America is working the way it was designed to. From the gilded age, circling back to this moment, we are exactly where the broligarchs want us to be.

Working Class Solidarity is Necessary we can’t afford our racism anymore!

The Americans Foundations Act Let’s go back and forward.

It’s not working anymore. Solutions?

Like most Americans these days, this last week left me depressed and unable to write.

My body is riddled with arthritis and neuropathy as well as having bi-polar disorder and complex PTSD. So when I go down, I go down hard.

Most days, I start in terrible pain while my husband manages a balance between ice packs, hot water bottles, medicine and edibles after about two hours, I am a reasonably rational person again until the next time the pain rears its ugly head, but beside my chair is a bookcase and a freezer to help me stay ahead of the pain all day.

That means my husband is more of a caregiver than I would like. I recently learned that my knees cannot be replaced because of an infection left in a leg with compound fracture. Apparently, if you have an infection in your bone and get your knee replaced, the infection will travel to the knee and the leg will have to be amputated.

All this is to say, like the rest of us, every day I struggle to stay alive, healthy and maintain a disciplined mind, every day we get squeezed it gets harder and harder.

This week I learned that, when differences in currency and wealth inequality are factored in, it turns out that Americans have to work twice as many hours to have the same purchasing power as their European or other first nation peer democracies

That is a huge red flag.

No wonder we have to work 2-3 jobs to stay afloat.

No wonder we wake up sweating in the middle of the night.

This week alone, there was a man in Ontario California that burned down a warehouse, one of 7 across the nation so far, because he wasn’t paid enough to live.

Starbucks unionizes, and Starbucks moves its headquarters out of Seattle.

A worker in an Amazon warehouse drops dead, bleeding out from a head wound onto the floor while the employee giving CPR begs for help, and another employee begs to help her, and is told by the floor manager to step around the body and keep working.

I am not sure which shocks me more, the fact that the manager gave that order or the fact the employees obeyed.

It is official. They no longer need to put us in chains, we have become slaves to our fear.

Amazon, Walmart, Target, even programming employees are finding themselves surviving by invisibly living out of cars and vans, parking on the street or in parking lots, only to be frequently and unconstitutionally harassed by local police.

It is not illegal to survive.

But after a week of fury, of not knowing what to do beyond burning it all down and starting over, I remembered my first, basic principle.

Fight and build what you believe in, instead of pouring your energy into fighting what you do not.

I will be the first to admit, that while I wish civil disobedience were enough to overthrow a corrupt regime, we all know there is a certain point at which that is no longer possible and we have no option but violent revolution.

My strongest faith is that we remember that we have been here before, we are all in this together, and together we can resist it. We need to immediately dissolve the illusionary barriers of race, class and ethnicity used to divide us and realize that we are all on the same side, all part of the same human race, and vote accordingly pretty quickly.

If you don’t see a leader you can get behind, stop waiting and lead.

Everyone of us has an area of expertise they can contribute their voices to, but if we don’t start sharing information with our neighbors it will be the downfall of our country.

This country was built on the blood of slavery and ethnocide. Not just black Americans and Native Americans, though they bore the brunt of the burden, but Chinese workers who were shipped in as slave labor to build the railroads.

And children of all colors. Between the from the 1850s til 1932 when FDR was elected, urban children of all colors were loaded onto trains and shipped into the midwest, sold as farmworkers. There were 250,000 of these children. That doesn’t include the numbers of children who died in the mines and factories in America’s gilded age. We have been here before.

And this is a form of slavery we overthrew.

We built social safety nets, expanded rights, expanded education, created national great works, roads, hydro electric dams, art and we sent doctors and teachers into under served areas for the students to work off their school loans.

From 1932 forward, the quality of life for the average American began to improve not equally, but equality was being fought for, tooth and nail, and we were making progress. Working conditions improved. Child labor was outlawed. Minimum wage was established as was the right of collective bargaining. For the first time in American history we could see the glimmer of an actualization of a nation of the people, by the people and for the people.

Then we hit the energy crisis of the 1970s, and the American economy stagnated. This was, essentially, because after our European and Asian global neighbors recovered from World War II, they had a more modern, rebuilt industry and suddenly we had to compete again. Instead of doing that, we elected Ronald Reagan which began the slow, intentional process of dismantling all of the systems that had enriched our country and made it so successful in the process.

I think there are plenty of people coming together today knowing what the problem is and we have some good ideas about what we can do about the crushing pressure of it all, but I think it is equally important to pay attention to what we can possibly build in the future as a hybrid of the opportunities that emerging science affords us combined with what we have learned from history and culture over the millennia of the human race.

I am going to propose some general solutions. I know I will get pushback, but hear me out.

• One person, one vote. All corporate money out of politics.

• Term reform

• Outlaw accepting bribes or allowing campaign contributions to affect legislative voting.

• Outlaw highly funded policy think tanks that had full blown legislation to local, state, and federal government designed to eliminate rights and capture our common resources.

• Outlaw corporate ownership of farm property

• Outlaw corporate ownership of housing.

• Outlaw corporate ownership of medical providers, clinics, ambulance and other medical services, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies.

• Fund basic food, medical care, transportation and shelter with public funds created by a “commons profit”

• A “commons profit” is a tax that corporations pay on the enormous gains they have made using the public commons, including all our combined create knowledge to train their ai models, government funded research of all types, water, air, public schools, transportation and the entire infrastructure of a society they did not build but not take advantage of.

• Promote small, locally funded, locally run, manufacturing cooperatives and ease regulations on cooperative business models.

• Promote small, sustainable food production.

• Promote small, family run businesses of all kinds.

• Get involved in local politics first.

• Provide income for those who do unrecognized or underrepresented “soft work” usually unpaid, usually done by women, that keep society moving and growing.

• Protect our elders and bring them back into the community.

• Reestablish stripped agencies

• Fund social security with taxes on income above $150k

• reform the tax system

• Reform the criminal justice system.

• Reform the immigration process.

• Fund public schools through PhD

• Fund apprenticeship projects

• Clear the way for new sciences, like printing homes as inexpensive solutions to modern problems

• Decentralize power through a series of loosely confederated community cooperative software.

That’s plenty to start with. What I am proposing is that we design a hybrid based on the best of the old and the new to create a third way, perhaps a new way for the human tribe, all of us, together, one purpose, many methods.

Our purpose? A balanced, sustainable, joyful or meaningful lives for people living free from fear, and a reinvestment in the greatest quality of diverse life possible on the planet.

If we commit ourselves to that future, and nothing less, then like landing on the moon, or creating worker and human rights, we shall make our world into whatever we put the bulk of our effort into.

Tearing down the old society? Or simply building a more functional one side by side and allow people to make choices for themselves, together.

How?

Start with what is within your reach. I have asked my readers and listeners to start having coffee with 3 strangers each week, to talk about how to create resilient, sustainable communities.

The next thing to do is to invest in both local manufacturing and farming, but also in new technologies that benefit all of us, not just a few. For example:

Finland is committed to wirelessly moving electricity from satellites to your homes. Around the world, other countries are creating overhead internet and power systems that, once perfected, could conceivably provide nearly free electricity and communications wirelessly to areas now completely void of infrastructure.

Not only energy, communication, but also the possibility of new monetary systems, for example, like that currently being negotiated between some aligned African nations. Unlike the northern hemisphere, the population of the southern hemisphere is growing, as is their investment in their countries infrastructure and education level. Young people are revolutionizing what is possible in the future. Imagine everyone has a home, everyone has food, everyone has shelter, everyone has transportation - because we have enough interconnected working systems to support us. Around the world, we have the resources, we have the people, soon - we will have all the energy we need.

Universal Basic Income.

Unexpectedly, universal basic income has recently found its way back into modern conversation. Is it a good idea? Some people think so, provided it is sufficient. If it is not, it would become another way of turning us right back into consumers renting our lives from them. That must stop. We are not for rent is we are not for sale. What is interesting, is that throughout the history of UBI, it has been alternatively supporte to by the left and the right.

The idea of universal basic income has been evolving now for centuries, and the few test cases have been extremely successful. That would begin to reinvest in our communities, our infrastructures, our homes, and most importantly, have enough time to have meaningful lives, whatever that means to each of us.

Tribes of tribes. One can form a “tribe” around any organizing principle, from science to girl scout cookies. But some examples include:

Cooperative Business Models is one way to create local businesses. Cooperation makes us economically and mentally healthier. Lifting our families out of poverty.

Is UBI feasible?

Other examples of worker cooperatives:

Starting a coop.

Interviews at a Coop and front line workers.

Lastly, keep in mind that if someone cuts you a check of any kind, you are a worker too. We all face the same health care challenges, housing challenges, food challenges, and challenges with sufficient wages, savings, insurance and company loyalty. No matter how high up you are, you are a line item like the rest of us and could be laid off at any time. And no matter how much saving or investment you have, when the bubbles start to crash, if you have not invested yourself in supporting your local community, they will not be there to support you when you need them.

So, once again, on my broken record, have coffee with three people in your community that you do not know at all and talk about community resilience and how to insure it. Gather contact information, and a list of needs.

At some point, you will have enough information to start a chain email to your new friends, directing them to where they might go to provide for their needs or the needs of others. Basically, get enough people in a room making a list of what they need, chances are very, very high that there are more than three others in the same room who might raise their hands and say “I have that”.

I was recently talking to a friend in desperated need of a housekeeper, but no longer able to afford a cleaning service.

“You tutor, don’t you?” She is a school teacher who loves teaching more than any other thing.

“Oh yes, I am a good tutor and I love it.”

“Great! Call a local time bank, or list on a local buy nothing neighborhood group and offer tutoring in trade for house work. Often you can find a one to one trade, but if not, a time bank can match you both with folks that need tutoring help and folks who are willing to clean house!”

“Oh my god,” she replied, “that’s a perfect solution! I never would have thought of it.”

I do something similar with a friend. Every other week we do batch cooking so refridgerate and freeze until 2 weeks later. I spend the day before in my chair cutting and doing prep cooking, then the next day, we assemble, spice and cook together. He goes home with free food for his labor, and we have cut our grocery bill less than half while I am currently eating within all my dietary restrictions. On alternating weeks, he comes over to clean and organize and make the meal plan for the following week so that David can pick up the groceries!

Recently, when he thought a full time job would take him away from this commitment, I posted a request for the same arrangement with neighors who live much closer by and there were 4 volunteers in 24 hours.

I know these things functions because I have used trade, barter and alternative trade methods as often as possible to keep my cash spending as low as possible, as I have never been flush with cash. But we have always had an abundant life.

Community participation is how we achieve that.

United we stand. Divided we fall.

Rinse and repeat.

This is the first in my list of many possible different ways of sharing and using the love, labor and resources of the community.

Diego Rivera, Detroit Mural

I am thrilled to get the first question from my recent podcast version of this column:

Is it disingenuous to claim that I am working class?

People and labor have equal value and I have no greater value than you. I have always found “ordinary” things to be extraordinary. Existence is miraculous, beautiful, and requires no justification for hierarchy from us to have value. Though, like many in my culture, I was taught to order things in rankings, I have tried to deprogram myself from this over and over again.

A character I quite liked from the film “A Very British Coup” once said:

“I believe all people are first class, don’t you?”

We need all voices. All expertise. All wisdom. All hands on deck.

We are all facing the same concerns. Less time. Too much work. Falling behind every year.

An entry level professional was paid $20 an hour in 1971, and $19 in 2025.

In 1971, the median price of a home was $23,400, roughly 3 times a working class yearly income. Now that same home is roughly more than 22 times an annual working class wage. That’s interesting, don’t you think?

Entry level professional positions today pay the same as entry level working class wages. So if we aren’t defining class by wages, education, or type of labor, what is it based on?

If we all made a living wage, and our resources were rationally managed, and our human needs integrated into our lives, we wouldn’t be having these conversations to begin with.

Remember, I live in a city where the corporate culture was founded by Jeff Bezos who said “I want my employees to show up for work every day afraid.” Yesterday in Oregon a bleeding factory worker died while the floor manager told them to keep working around the body. Starbucks is having strikes, over 12,000 workers on strike.

Bill Gates was too busy figuring out how to turn stolen inventions and resources into subscriptions we would have to pay for every year for the rest of our lives, while trying to secretly slip his wife antibiotics so that she wouldn’t notice he’d given her an STI by skeezing around with Epstein victims.

These are not smart guys, and these are not nice guys. Born into wealth and a staggering sense of privilege, they treat us like prey and in private have been recorded saying that it would be better if we just died off once we were no longer useful.

Useful to whom?

I feel pretty useful to myself. And my husband and my community think so too. But my value is hard to measure. I have what is sometimes called “soft” value. I offer emotional support and advocacy, and other sorts of unpaid labor that women do that are required for society to function.

My husband is a letter carrier. That is easier to statistically measure. After the famous, but illegal, letter carriers strike, USPS letter carriers got two successive raises of 14% a year, bringing their hourly income up to $4.60 an hour or annual income of $9600 per year.

In 1971 auto workers made $6.18, a little more than letter carriers. A doctor made $20 an hour or S42,000 annually. At that time, we considered what we then considered a professional level wage. A doctor made 3.2 times what a factory worker did, but a factory worker could still buy a home for a little less than three times his annual salary, or $28,000, which seemed fair at the time, and also within the reach of the average person. Of course not all of us were “average”, but unfortunately that will have to be the topic of another essay for now.

Consider wages now. The entry level pay for a USPS letter carrier is $19 an hour in a town where the minimum wage is $15 an hour.

Now, that same letter carrier makes $39,500. And the entry level minimum wage worker is making $31,200. Both, even when added together, are below the poverty line in Seattle.

This is a cumulative inflationary rate of 692.72%. Translated over those 54 years, not allowing for compound interest, that is $6,650,000 in lost wages - or purchasing power if you prefer - during the most productive 54 years in American history, not accounting for any portion of that lost income at the stock market for 54 years at 10% per year.

Meanwhile, the cost of a home, $28,000 in Seattle in 1971 was a little less than three times a working class salary. In 2026, the cost of a home in Seattle is $900,000, twenty three times the annual working class salary.

How were any of us going to keep pace with that?

And where did all that money go?

I would suggest that if you are not now working class, you are very likely to be well on your way towards it. Or if we are very lucky, on your way towards abandoning the idea of class as anything of value to attain.

CEO pay has risen 1024%. America has 902 billionaires, and nine men control more than 50% of the world’s wealth and resources.

So welcome to the working class, because it’s coming for you. It’s coming for all of us. Until we all decide the word means nothing.

Our culture loves to hold up the examples of great men, of all of those who made it.

This morning I found myself weeping over the millions of lives of those who didn’t.

We can feel empathy for a starving child, but once the numbers get too high, our overwhelm pushes us past our ability to feel anything.

The way we overcome overwhelm, that inability to feel the beating of our own hearts any more is by holding onto the feelings, the feelings of our families, the resonance of music that rings with our bones, the words that call to our souls as well. Hoard those like gold. Because that is where humanity’s wealth lives. The human heart responds to human need -- human stories -- not to numbers.

That’s why our stories are so important.

All that hate, and as if there were not enough, we invent a new prejudice that seemed universally fair: Meritocracy. We reward, and entrust leadership, to those who have proven to have more merit - where? In the equality of the marketplace, of course. Capitalism clearly showed us where competence lay!

Competence at what? Hoarding wealth? Stealing from others?

Or a constant game of “Lucy and the Football”. Practice, play, get good enough to take aim -- only to have the football ripped away at the last minute.

It is the best way to control us. They are not stupid. But neither are we. Not forever. No matter how much of our thinking time they eat up, our gut is telling us that this is the wrong way to live. It is unnatural and not worth it.

Suffering knows suffering, way past color, culture or language. Our bodies are not stupid either.

Around the world, where work and success are prized above all else, people are having fewer and fewer children. In some cultures around the world, young people have given up on the idea of ever raising a family. In others, young people are simply laying down in the street to “”die” quietly in protest because their lives are not worth living.

In our gut, we are all starting to feel like slaves.

Enough, I say.

Enough.

No more needs to be said. Now is the time for action.

Fortunately, the actions are easy. Start with meeting three people a week and talking about rebuilding our communities.

The value of the hours in the sand glass of our economy have stopped making sense. The first fifteen seconds of a billionaire’s life is not worth the entirety of your lifetime. The math doesn’t work, the ecology doesn’t balance, and all joy producing activity stops.

Time enough for love. The time we have lost is the time we need to spend loving each other, and loving our home.

The most challenging thing facing Americans today is the weight of inequality and loss of most of our daily hours. The hours we need to maintain physical and mental health, the hours we need to care for our elders, our children, our friends, our neighborhood, and our community.

That inequality was designed. And we did not choose it. Going into the midterms, we might want to consider community engagement at the most local possible level.

Stick together, with the rest of humanity, for the rest of humanity.

There is a book by Robert Heinlein, titled Take Your Country Back, in which he talks about the irresistible force of volunteering in one’s community, and the fact that the influence of money cannot combat boots on the ground in the end. Though he refused to back politicians, he spent his life quietly volunteering for the Democratic party.

Common Sense Solutions Together Possibilities:

Why We Must Change

Bitches Rule! Stop Tolerating the Intolerable

Racism is Taught

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=south+pacific+you+have+to+be+carefully+taught

Myth of Meritocracy - They are lucky idiots

Wealth Addiction

Wealth Hoarding is a Mental Illness

BIG by Matt Stoller

Emergency Prices: How Private Equity Captured the Ambulance Market

Dan Geller is a Staff Attorney at Antimonopoly Counsel and can be reached at dan@antimonopoly.us…

Read more

18 days ago · 236 likes · 14 comments · Matt Stoller and Dan Geller

Better Ideas - Lots of Examples of what works- learning from each others and 1000s of solutions - many communities inventing many ideas

If We are Going to Thrive - How to Turn it Around this Generation by Design

Rights or Duties?

Are Living Things Equal?

The Value of Thinking Small: I needed glasses all through school

Value Public Education: Creating Good Citizens re James Madison

Shoulder to Shoulder Love in Places we Break

Native Traditional Ecological Food Security Systems

Non Chemical Energy Storage?

Using Data Center Heat to Heat Homes?

Using Oceans to Cool Data Centers and Improve Reef Health?

We Make Wealth Together

The latest Economists with Simple Ideas and more data offer proof - wealth does not equal employment or trickle down opportunities greater than extraction of labor and resources. Profit seeks more profit as its only goal.

As I mentioned in my most recent welcome post on March 27, it included a quote my mother gave me when I was 4, before I lost her to depression.

“People are mean because they are in pain, Sarah Beth,” she told me in one of her few lucid moments. Mean to themselves, mean to each other. I have not heard a more reasonable explanation since.

Born in innocence, we are trained into fear and hate.

Around age 11 I started questioning what I was being taught everywhere, but especially in “world history”. After about 3 months of what my gut told me couldn’t possibly be true, I pulled my history teacher aside and said:

“Ok, I get it, we think the Roman Empire was important, but if I am to believe what I read here, white people invented civilization and every bit of progress ever since - presuming that is even progress - and I don’t understand how I am supposed to come to any other conclusion than white people are smarter and superior, since white people invented everything. Now, since I know that’s nonsense, and I don’t want to grow up to be a racist, can you help me here?”

By the way, of course I am that annoying kid that never stopped asking “Yeah, but why?”

Worse, I was a girl, and in case you didn’t know, during this period of time women were financially owned by some male relative and could only leverage power by influencing the men they were financially or legally dependent upon. And at the time children were also not considered people, but governed under property law.

About half my teachers were thrilled to have even one student with a hungry mind - female or not, while others were simply irritated by my incessant questions. Since there was no gifted students program at that time and place - and I think I got the better education for it - my teachers resolved the problem by having me do my homework for 15 minutes, help my classmates for 15 minutes, and then I would be free to read anything in the school library I liked for the remaining half hour. That was 4 free hours a day at the library. Now yes, it was a censored library, but after introducing me to Egyptian history, my social studies teacher, English, and science teachers began bringing me books from home.

I started learning about the history of other cultures around the world, their evolution and their migration. Who lived by war? Who lived in relative peace? Who was stable? Who was not? What was the average person’s life like? Which exposed principles produced the promised results? What were the cycles of stability and breakdown? What caused them and why?

And even though there were no books on systems theory at the time, I began to see repeated patterns.

The human race lived in small, hunter gathering bands at least 200,000 years ago. Not being physically impressive, nor apex predators, they nonetheless were able to cooperate better than troop apex predators, like wolves, and they learned to make tools and hand gestures to improve communication for cooperation. They cared not only for children, but fossil records also showed they cared for their elderly and those injured enough to be unable to hunt for themselves. They showed intelligence of combined problem solving. Their vocal chords evolved, at first to mimic animal noises, then the ability to hum. The old stories say of language came , or pre from singing and that is confirmed by fossil records.

All human beings can be traced back to a single ancestor, an African woman most often referred to as “Eve”. So, other than a social contruct, concept of any race other than the human race is race is utter nonsense, with ethnicity and religion as an excuse for hatred coming in a close second and third.

For most of 200,000 years human beings managed to live in relative peace. Once in awhile, a group would wipe out another, but more often, bands of humans learned the cost in lives over hunting grounds was usually greater than it was worth. I will bang my chest, you will yell insults at me, we agree to try to stay out of each other’s way and live to fight another day. Sometimes a band decides to start raiding women. Right up until the women catch a kidnapper and torture him to death, thus establishing the legal framework for deterrence.

You think I jest. Only a little. Mostly people were only as savage as we are forced to be. In the smallest groups, sociopaths - bullies who cannot be shamed into seeing or caring that they are hurting others - were typically simply driven out and therefore unable to breed. But if they became bands of raiders and rapists - that would last a little while, but not long after your neighbors figured out what you were doing.

And thus human culture evolved through fits and starts, culture, ethical system, and taboos being first based on the survival requirements of one’s specific environment, and then compounded through the success and failure of cultures as we evolved, perfecting ourselvess, and our relationships with our neighbors.

Most lived migratory lives, planting what they needed in local habitats, including food for the game animals that supported them and medicine for ailments they had discovered through testing and process of elimination. Foods were replanted where they were found and planting grounds returned to for gathering seasonally. Food was preserved for seasons and hard times. Elders were valued as living survival libraries, and most “free” people worked 20 hours a week on survival, and spent the rest of their time on an infinity of other human pursuits.

Markets evolved as trade gatherings, but the necessities of life were shared within a community. The market was for extra, luxuries, improved or different trade goods, but fundamentally sustainable, nothing taking too much from the habitat or from the hours of people’s lives.

Cities rose. Some stayed. Some collapsed under their own weight. Those with the most equality and the least imperial ambition seemed to last the longest.

So what happened?

I am not sure we can quite pin down who invented the concept of empire, but I don’t think that many would argue against that the Romans were the first to make a good solid show of it. But impressive as it may have looked, Rome would never be as sustainable as Egypt had been, because it was fundamentally a con.

“Only a white man would believe that if you cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom you would get a longer blanket.”

Teaching critical thinking isn’t easy. The teaching of scale is harder. So the Romans waged war by propaganda of unprecedented scale. With legions mixed and matched so that no soldier was ever fighting family on his home turf. Smart move that.

“We have shown you the might of Rome! Resistance is futile. But if you surrender, we will appoint a governor, station troops for your protection (read racket) and you will have the rights of any other Roman citizen, to govern yourselves and also be protected by the might of Rome.” All it will cost is a percentage of your crops in taxes, and your young men as volunteers for our “foreign legions.”

If it’s not immediately obvious, this was a shell game. Someone marches through your village with thousands of soldiers in armor, pomp and ceremony, they must be from a very great place indeed. Other nations could see perfectly well that the soldiers being moved from place to place were only really effective when gathered and pointed at a weak spot, but no single kingdom had the power to unite the others democratically, yet. If everyone had revolted at one time, the Romans simply wouldn’t have been able to hold the land.

If you can look backwards from the current corporate oligarchy of being a cross boundary empire you can see the direct evolution as the powerful managed revolt after revolt evermore distancing themselves from the direct consequences of their consolidation of power and abuse of resources for their own purposes.

At first, the Empire couldn’t overcome the Christians because they are conscientious objectors and refused to kill their neighbors. Crucified, stoned and beheaded their leaders were executed as enemies of the state. They were as stubborn as Jews. They would only follow God and refused to kneel to Roman divinity.

Then Emperor Constantine had a brilliant idea. Convert to Christianity as the state religion, and codify it into law. And then by some “magical” somehow, the Empire is again gradually in charge of your soul, your salvation, and your freedom is forfeit with your conversion to the state religion at the point of a sword.

Suddenly, the government narrative is that it was not the Roman Empire who killed Jesus, but the Jews, thus silencing another voice of resistance.

Round and round it goes, and the language changes, but the system does not.

Except for that pesky wildman. That aboriginal. That original person who for hundreds of thousands of years has been raised to believe we are part of the divine, the divine is part of us and we have lived in that understanding since we can remember. Actions have visible consequences. We do not need the fear of hell and damnation to teach us to be kind to each other. We learned that as babies…

Keep in mind that for most of 196,000 years human beings had no concept of owning things. Territory, yes. Ownership, no. Ownership presumes that one could commodify the for which there can be no price:

Life.

You cannot put a price on land, because all life needs it to survive. Nor water, nor air, nor soil, nor plants, nor animals, nor people, nor children.

Cultural differences notwithstanding, the closer we got to ownership, to inequality, the worse life became - for most.

“Most” is a lot, by factors of billions. And whether we can see it or not, every form of ownership is a form of slavery.

I could list millions of examples, but ponder this, while Ford motor company is using the police and racist union busting methods to start pitting poor white people against poor black people. It’s probably a good idea to mention here the evolution of the police force and its relationship with the black community.

We have divided people enough to distract them, meanwhile Nestle bottles and manipulated permits in Michigan to stay extract just under 400,000 gallons of fresh water per minute from the largest fresh water repository in the world, visibly lowering the level of the lake, and damaging the watershed and pollution concentrated in the natural water supply in a way that contributed to increased concentrations of waste in the public water in multiple places in Michigan, not just Flynt. What happens when those elected to protect us do not do so?

Since police were originally created to retrieve black slaves, and later used against people of all colors to shoot into union organizers, with the national guard and pinkertons poisoning milk - do you really think the people bribing your representatives in congress are on your side? As we weed out and limit corruption within our systems, we also need to examine to roots of our own misguided thinking in the process. Is sending the National Guard in to quell protests really what we want to do? In 1967 Detroit, we thought yes. Now we think quite differently.

As a society, we can and do change, dispite the best efforts to break us apart.

As they pit black from white, ethnicities of all sorts, generations of immigration, labels, labels, labels. Anything they can do to get us pointing the finger at each other and away from them.

While investors are shifting their car manufacturing overseas and telling you it’s your neighbors fault. As is the fact that your wages haven’t risen in real dollars since 1980, by a significant amount, but property and education has skyrocketed so upward mobility is dead, so your kids can’t go to college or buy a house or get a decent job.

Not because I have billions of dollars I have sucked out of your extremely productive economy with my insured, very safe investments of my capital in your governement, your ingenuity and labor without contributing back to your schools, roads, hospitals or -- oops, my bad -- anything since 1980. Well, we have AI and robots now.

You can just die.

As Nixon, Reagan, and the whole neoconservative movement pushed our rights back to the gilded age as planned all along, by having separated those of us who work for living from each other and from our own communities, financially by the hour and square foot, consuming so much of our time that we feel desperately alone and as though we have no time for ourselves let alone each other.

Can you see the perfection of the system?

First its my fault, and I am consumed with private shame. Then someone tells me I don’t have to feel ashamed, it’s your fault.

And while I am watching that peashell, I missed the coin of gold I gave you that is now in your pocket when you promise me 2 if only I would stay in the game.

American Roulette. Bet your like upon it. Bet all the hours of your life that you have as much merit as anyone else.

Until 15 seconds of their life is worth the entirety of one our own.

Then what do we do?

The citizens revolt. The revolution is sanitized and co-opted by the dominant paradigm - if we let it.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

How were you taught, as a child, that you were even a little bit better than others in any way?

How were you not taught, as a child, what the invisible systems that held that structure in place looked like?

When I was 21 I devised a private point system to overcome the personal shame of my own failures. But first I laid out a couple of undeniable facts. I am not stupid. I have a few learning disabilities, but devised enough ways around them that I turned them to my advantage when I could, and hired out things like typing at first if I had to. All my childhood I was taught that if I studied hard and kept my nose clean, I could accomplish anything. I had every reason to believe that would be true.

I studied my butt off. I was plenty smart. But for the learning disabilities, they simply could not devise a test they could measure me by. My computation was 80% because I could not add a column of numbers, hence later write a line of code, and before word processing, typing was almost impossible as I learned by reading the shape of words so needed a computer aid for spelling. But I read extensively, so I could reason. If I hadn’t insisted on a drafting class, I don’t know how I would have deciphered 3-D models, which again made me suspect of cultural, class and in this case gender bias in testing. Drafting wasn’t offered to girls, but I insisted on it through the Civil Rights Commission which, under the law at the time, prevented discrimination from certain studies on the basis of sex. But this is an obvious example a detriment to understanding geometry and engineering - you know, stuff that “women aren’t good at”. I was driven to excell at everything I attempted except sports, as I was not allowed.

And if the history of your culture doesn’t match what’s in this history book, well, your family’s experience isn’t on the test, too bad, so sad. My brain afforded me the luxury of studying both, but did not blind me to the obvious, systemic injustice occuring, even in the testing.

So, I tried to devise an equality of opportunit test. I started with the salary of the average professional white man, of average intelligence, with a C average in a state school.

I added points for sheer study, one for hard work, another for generational wealth that would teach one wealth management, legacy schools, private grammar schools, ivy league universities, sororities, fraternities, social connections, parental investment, social investment from people who are friends of the family, assets to borrow against, and credit access.

Then I started withdrawing points.

I got down to working class, white, male, merit scholars (studied their asses off) and worked while going to school, so “worked hard”.

At that level, I noticed that I and all my peers had not advanced at all. None of us graduated from college because Reagan cut our scholarships. Of those merit scholars I went to school with, only two graduated. One cheated on his financial aid forms. One dealt drugs to pay for his rent and tuition.

Neither of which would have occurred to me.

So for those of us who did what we were told - we did not get the world we were promised. I mean, poor us, welcome to the working class, white man.

Did you know there was a study done by confused white social workers who didn’t understand why first time poor whites shipped up from the south to work in factories behaved exactly like poor blacks shipped up from the south for the same reason. They assumed that behavior that comes from entrenched poverty was a function of race and confused as to why it repeated itself in Detroit without social support for both black and white families needing entry level education, housing, medical care, and skills in things like money management and home ownership - new problems with new responsibilities for all.

I kept subtracting points. One for race. One for language. Then I started withdrawing from my score, which was at -2 being born female and working class, then dropped 10 more points to -12 because I lived with all of these experiences. If you have never seen an ACEs score, it is a modern attempt to predict the life one will have based on childhood circumstances, regardless of race. It looks like this:

You decide for yourself how many points to subtract, if any for being an invisible slave in my own culture and then having to learn how to be a human being from scratch.

Yeah. The cards were stacked against my entire generation forward, unless you were born into substantial generational wealth from the get go. No matter how hard you worked, no matter your race or what group you came from, you were born to disappoint. First yourself, then your parents, then your society.

Until you were stripped of the wealth value of every hour of your time.

All of us. All the same.

All together now.

We can no longer afford to fall asleep at the wheel from one generation to the next. The planet can’t take it, and neither can we.

Our forefathers had fought this battle the Civil War to as the first attempt to fulfill on the promise of universal suffrage for men and declare that human beings were never to be bought and sold as property. Then, after the stock market crash of the guilded age in 1929, we turned to populist candidates with vision for a future for all of us. FDR brouht in a competent admistration that delivered food, work, housing, medicine, and a safety net in what was then the most progressive democratic economy of the time - along with the establishment of the UN and the drafting of Global, Universal Human Rights.

Yest we have still been living in a “push me - pull you” between the wealthy and those who produce wealth for a couple of cycles now since the industrial revolution, and the numbers are in. I think the consequences of not taxing the rich equally are plain to see an that our foray into “trickle down” economics was a failure - at least for citizens.

We have to remember that we win major victories, and continue to win them - by fighting for them. Every one. Every generation has to fight for them, but we have to remember to build what we believe in and withdraw our attention from what is designed to distract and separate us.

Once again, I will continue to urge us to trust in our common humanity. Our common stories. Billions don’t scale to our imaginations. But neighborhoods do. Meet the people in your neighborhood and find out what you and your neighbors need.

Then meet your neighbors in the next neighborhood. Especially if they don’t look like you.

Because they have been wounded by the same forces that you have, all while being told that you were the source of those wounds.

I would suggest that you were not. And to the degree you unwittingly participated in and benefitted in an oppressive system it’s time to admit it and stop. Because you are going to need your neighbors. We are all in the same leaky lifeboat of as little as the oligarchs will allow.

And those minority communities have generational memories that come with skills that you will need to survive.

The Radical Story of Free People: How, What and Why we make the choices we make, and use the resources we have, every day?

Assuming that we all have a right to be here, I believe the highest quality of life for the greatest number of people, while providing compassionately for outliers, has been the bedrock goal of humanity since humanity began.

The most radical, democratic thing you can do to affect social change this week is to talk to 3 people in your community that you don’t know. That’s where we have to start to understand and address our common concerns. Trust the process, learn to listen. Two ears, one mouth.

Who Rules the World? Well, I am thinking the people who live here should, how about you?

Self Government and Why Its Stable: How the Rich Eat Us

The Math that Made our Time a Commodity vs. Lives as Members of a Community:

Human Rights and Responsibilities:

The Cost of Extraction Capitalism:

How Do We Survive? Welcome Imperfect Candidates Just Like Us

Practical, Philosophical Basis for Sustaiable Economy:

The Opposite of Common Resources: Water Use in the Great Lakes Watershed and Who Owns the Fresh Water?

Democracy and reaching consensus is messy and it takes time, but it is far better than the alternative.

The most radical thing you can do this week to support your community is meet and really get to know the stories of 3 strangers this week.

Around the world, small voices are speaking about the damages of inequality.

The oppressed are finding voices in the public square again, as though the printing press has been reinvented and paper is free.

The power is there, all we have to do is reach for it and yield it wisely.

And to use it wisely, all we need is to be gently deprogrammed away from fear and hatred, and reminded to take enough measured risk to trust the stranger and see what she might have to share.

Just that. Share our Strengths. Our joy. Our hope!

In this historic moment, I am going to attempt to place my stick in the place where my sort of voice will have the greatest leverage - while asking others to do the same. Because diversity of voices is the point.The best weapon we have to fight with is coming together.

In small groups, of small groups, of larger groups demanding our voices be accurately reflected with immediate consequences for not carrying out the will of the people to represent.

Pretty simple.

In this historic moment, I am going to attempt to place my stick in the place where my sort of voice will have the greatest leverage - while asking others to do the same. Because diversity of voices is the point.

Even scientifically, which of course we are not taught, 100 totally random people will solve any problem better than 100 specialists alone. In a simple example,100 random people guessing the accurate weight of a single pig will give wildly divergent and inaccurate answers. But funny thing happens when those numbers are averaged, they are nearly spot on.

Same with building a bridge. If all the people in the room are engineers, they will be talking about metal and materials and load bearing and math.

Once you bring in a farmer, the bamboo grower, a farmer, a mother, a grandmother, care givers, those able and disabled who have to traverse the bridge, a forester, a laborer, a driver of vehicles that delivers things, walkers, people who manage budgets, watershed and habitat - fishermen and folks that want clean water - then labor time required measured against benefits, and then you have all the ingredients to create a functional, lasting plan for a solution that exists for a season or a century depending on the community’s actual needs. Experts give expert solutions. Communities create consensus solutions. Are these the “best” decisions? Who outside a community knows best what is good for that community?

Roman roads lasted thousands of years beyond their empire. What a marvel. They were not built for trade or even to benefit the communities they plowed through. They were built for armies to transport troops, conquer, and then return with captured humans and plunder, while establishing “governors” to plunder more resources and soldiers to serve Rome.

Maybe we don’t build things like we used to.

But perhaps we should be building them as we need them to be - for us. For here, for us, our children and their children and the rest of the life we would like to sustain us in this region.

We are, almost all of us, quietly wounded.

Kindness is fundamental to human nature.

An unkind human being is, to a greater or lesser degree, a reaction to pressure on an unhealed wound - with a list of pressures that turn neighbor against neighbor.

There are those who use that pain to their advantage, to separate us.

The best weapon we have to fight with is coming together.

In small groups, of small groups, of larger groups demanding our voices be accurately reflected with immediate consequences for not carrying out the will of the people to represent.

Pretty simple.

What if we know that best where we are? Why aren’t you asking before you ask for my vote?

Oh, you are afraid to show up?

She wasn’t. She wants to hear my story. She is listening. She showed up. You didn’t. Not only that, but she talked to my neighbor, and his neighbor, and their neighbors, and she sat down and listened.

Do we have to move so fast? Why do we have to work so many hours to survive in such a rich country? Who set this up? We didn’t. How did we get here? Why don’t we have the time for conversation and agreement?

I have found some towns that have designed these for modest budgets - wanna pool our money, visit and see what they know?

Whadda ya say?

Wanna invent a new future?

This is America baby. If we dream it, we can build it. The great experiment.

Time to take it back again.

Multiple groups of people all around the world are solving local problems ingeniously in this way. But who reports these stories?

I want to.

They are proof that we are not born to be selfish.

Can we live within at least a moderate compromise that we invent to satisfy and therefore preserve the needs and managed ambitions of all life in a balanced, healthy way?

It’s been done before. By most, for likely 200,000 years.

Plus lots of new fiction content on:

https://www.sarahbyam.com/

As a dedicated champion of good guys at large, I’ve spent my life in the support of community building and individual empowerment whenever I can.

My earliest memory was of my mother standing down a group of teenage boys in the 1967 riots about to beat each other to a pulp.

“Your mothers would be ashamed of you. Go home!”

And, as if they were pulled out of a trance, they set down their boards and bats, and a little dazed, they walked away.

I lost my mother and I was then a silenced child, yet a powerful narrative has been rising in me, bursting to get out. My mind organized itself like a book constantly writing itself, punctuated by a substantial sound track which gave emotional cues. My mind was always writing, standing back a bit, observing. My heart was always singing, fully engaged fully, overwhelmingly engaged, intimately in love with the world around me.

The writer was born so young because that love was, almost entirely, unrequited. Worse, and horrifying, it was socially acceptable to be unlocking that love, to be showing it opening. And yet that taboo was something, which I knew in my bones to be wrong.

It was something we were taught. In fact, force fed.

“Why are people so mean?” I asked my mother, not long before I lost her again to depression at age 4, never to have her again.

“People are mean because they are in pain, Sarah Beth,” she told me in one of her few lucid moments.

As cruelty created pain, and then it seemed pain created cruelty, there seemed only one important mission from that moment forward.

“We have to be kind, and patient with people in pain, “ said my deeply religious mother. It wasn’t even necessary at that point. In that moment my life calling was set:

Find and destroy the source of pain through which evil spreads in the world.

I was all of 3 years old.

As Emily Dickenson said:

“This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me…”

These conversations, these essays, these stories are the accumulation of a lifetime of unwritten letters I only now know how to offer. If you want to listen, I have a tremendous story of hope and triumph to share which, through a lifetime of struggle, study and healing might finally hold something of value. I have a powerful story. So do you. That is my faith. That is my stand.

Human nature is not evil. Evil is propaganda, invented, and taught to divide us by a tiny minority who spread hate like a psychological illness, a social virus, to benefit from our division.

Divided, we become extinct.

United, as a community, we thrive.

They thought they had buried us. They have planted our seeds.

How?

Great question!

Let’s share what we have learned, shall we?

This is Practical Hope in Hard Times

Welcome

“The more you love, the more you can love—and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of that majority who are decent and just.”

Love him or hate him, Robert Heinlein was an important contributor to Science Fiction, and American fiction in general. Beginning in the mid 1940s, what began as hard science fiction from a naval engineer, gradually became social science fiction that challenged our beliefs, our mores, and our assumptions about what it meant to be a free human being.

Unlike many male writers of his time, he outgrew most of his misogyny and bigotry and simply admitted that there were experiences vastly beyond his ken that he would not presume to give opinion or instruction upon.

About 1% of the human race is cursed with sociopathy. Or rather I should say, we are cursed with them because, as a species we are now at a cross roads where that 1%, and the additional core 4% who follow them in packs and gangs to oppress the rest of us, have put us in the intolerable position where we not longer have time enough to love each other.

This attempt to convert all of our life energy into someone else’s coin is about as evil a proposition as has ever been invented, and they keep getting better at perfecting it.

We truly have one survival option left to us.

We must stop playing this game.

If, as African children say, what fun is a game if all of us cannot win?

Contrary to what we are taught, human beings have survived quite happily on 20 hours of labor a week for all basic necessities, leaving the rest of our time for more human pursuits of love, art, music, story telling, science, nature, relationships, dance, solitude and play.

Contrary to what we are taught, civilizations that existed without imperial ambitions usually accomplished just that, as well as rule of law, and justice which was much easier to enforce when there was no reason for crime.

Bullying has not been tolerated in most societies for most of history.

Until that 1% discovered how we could be separated from our common humanity. It is normal to be suspicious of strangers, but after a lifetime of experience as a person without family, culture, money, or tribe, I can tell you most human beings are not suspicious of a stranger who appears open handed, peacefully, without obvious intent to harm.

In fact, this is so core to our nature, that missionaries used this part of human nature to captivate and then dominate other cultures far older and far healthier than any European culture. The Romans, and those who inherited their empire went on to perfect the art of bullying into the state of the world we currently find ourselves in.

We are so overworked we have no time for love.

Not for our children, our elders, our neighbors, our community, our nation and then ultimately the world.

Well bully for them, as the English like to say.

We quit.

There are many, many ways to withdraw support from an inherently unjust system, but the first most important thing to recognize is that it is there.

Distinctions between all members of the human race are fiction, sold to us largely as propaganda. The only way to know another culture is to participate in it. Anyone who is trying to teach you to hate any of your neighbors has something to gain from your hatred, your separation from your innate and our collective humanity.

The most stable form of society is a community of communities. Each responding to the needs of its own environment, planting it like a garden and living in it as such.

The cultures that developed this way of living, which at one time was most of the world, lived long, relatively healthy, happy lives.

Unlike we were taught, the life of the average Native American was not nasty, brutish and short. When elders told white people their ages, the settlers presumed they couldn’t count.

“Only a white man would cut a foot off a blanket, sew it to the other end, and believe that he had enlarged the blanket. When all the trees are cut, all the plants are dead, all the water is dirty - what will you eat then? Certainly all the gold in the world will not feed you.”

That was the life of a European, even more so after the onset of the industrial revolution.

Overwork, resistance, then separations to break resistance.

At the moment it seems foolish to begin to recount the number of times this has been done.

So what I will keep proposing is this:

Build a longer table. Invite as many neighbors from as many different communities as you can because they will each bring their own skills to that table, their own experience, their own pain, their own history and their historical solutions.

In the hybrids created from that collaboration, sustainable resistance will be born.

But we must prepare to care for each other.

Because no matter what they may promise you, that 1% will not.

And chains that steal your time are still chains, whether they are crafted from iron, gold, or simple survival fear.

We do not need them.

Some will say, but they have all the money.

But what is money?

Money is only a promise. There are other ways to create systems of fair mutual support, most of which exist in those hybrid solutions.

During the covid recession, there was one community that printed its own money on balsa wood, only to be traded at local businesses. The “money” was supported by the city taxes, but had actual value while it was being traded. None of the local businesses had to close their doors. Isn’t that a remarkable solution?

Most human beings clearly understand a market place. I make something of value to you, you pay me enough for my time, materials and efforts that I can live and care for my family. Very fair trades.

But where do we go when corporate interest tax our labor with profit not in the small margins, return on their capital investment, but in orders of magnitudes so high that seconds of their time is worth your entire life.

Of course this is not a market place and obviously utterly unsustainable.

We need to invent means of caring for each other that do not require participation in the corporate market place any more than necessary, by any means necessary. This looks like different things to different people with different resources, strengths, and capacity.

But everyone is valuable. Everyone has something important to contribute.

Start by meeting your neighbor.

What do they need?

What do you have?

What can be shared?

What can be traded?

What do we own so much of that we never need to buy most of what we buy?

Granted, we are being squeezed at every angle, so we have to get creative in our problem solving.

If, for example, a company is charging some clients more money than others for their food as well as also paying some drivers less - all based on predetermined algorithms - and we know this to be true - perhaps it is time to hold a town hall, employ drivers as a community service for the elderly and disabled, perhaps an extra service fee for those who can afford it. This way we ensure all the drivers are paid fairly, we are charged fairly for our food, and the tips actually go to the driver?

How many such services are needed that we could simply and easily convert to community services?

Granted, we have a pretty messed up tax system.

However, if we get together, plan together, share together, budget together - we may find we need to make less money and simply, for example, own our own electricity provider?

Many communities attempt these things only to have themselves shut down by heavily funded corporate interests.

Which means we need to respond with two things:

Cooperation between not just neighbors, but also communities.

And

Boots on the ground.

Because all the advertisements in the world cannot overcome millions of conversations with our neighbors if we are committed to having them.

And that is what resistance and ultimately change, require.

What will you quit tomorrow?

And how will you employ that energy elsewhere to your benefit and the benefit of the future of your loved ones?

Because I guarantee you, there is plenty we can do.

There is plenty of historical precedent of what works and what does not.

The first, most important step you can take is introducing yourself to someone who does not look like you, may not live like you, may not believe what you believe. The devil isn’t the people your hatred had been directed towards. The devil is the director of your hatred - follow the money. Because at a fundamental level, every one of “them” bleeds red just like you do. The needs of their hearts are the needs of your heart. Right now we are told we have an epidemic of loneliness in our country. Best do something about that.

Your heart is needed.

You are not disposable.`

And just in case you need one more reason to get out of your house and meeting your neighbors:

https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_levine_how_i_made_friends_with_reality

https://highway58herald.org/the-unexpected-radical-roots-of-redneck/

Gradually over these essays I have been revealing the lessons I learned from a hard and complex life that has major chapters:

I was born unwanted into torture and slavery to a family with a tradition of slavery dating back to the 1600s on one side and “human trafficking”, dating back to the 1920s on the other. As I grew, I was miraculously unwilling to give up my deep, unshakable faith in life, and by extension, humanity. With the help of others, I was able to legally free myself at 16.

From there my true education as a human being began. Over the course of my life, from the outside looking in, I learned what it meant to be a child, to heal, a mature person, and a member of my community in messy order while juggling severe bi-polar disorder and chronic, intractable depression, as well as complex PTSD. Without the unconditional, overwhelming love and care I had no right to expect from strangers of all colors and ethnicities, I would never have survived.

Between my unique experiences, unique neurology, and obsessive study, I have developed an uncommon perspective. I know, down to the marrow of my bones, that the fear of “other” that we have been raised with here, as well as other places, is propaganda used to control us. Many civilizations have evolved without imperial agendas, but starting about 5000 years ago, of those that did catch the imperial virus the worst perfected it so well that the people now obediently enslave themselves - almost.

Human nature, in fact all nature, will not be held at bay without consequences. The tighter the hold, the more severe the ultimate consequences. Also, most of what we have been taught about human progress is also a lie meant to enslave us to feed the economic models we built, which we now know are dysfunctional.

Outside the US, all over the world, people are waking up to these problems and finding their own ecological, local, regional, national, and internationally cooperative solutions. Truly, we currently have all the technology, all the resources, and access to all the energy we need to resolve our concerns, repair the damage we have done to our planet and create meaningful, forward facing lives for everyone. We might want to accept the idea that “money” is an invention, another kind of unstable mythology, but it holds no intrinsic value. Free “original” people have always known this. The rest of the world is figuring it out.

Except here in America. We will eventually overcome, but right here, right now, we are so ignorant of our own history and struggles that we are painfully, unnecessarily fractured. I am one of those who feels compelled to share what I have learned to contribute to healing my community.

Here is what I know: with the exception of a minority of treasure hunters, we - all of us on both American continents - bear the scars of our collective history. We are all migrants, our families fleeing , or by forced by persecution, slavery of many types, and starvation, without hope, against all odds, just for the ideal of building a decent life for ourselves and families. Most of us got chewed up by the machinery of our propaganda in the process.

That propaganda is ever present and arrived inherent in systems our European ancestors fought at least 2 world wars to unlearn. We aren’t there yet, but at least the world is awakening.

And yet at this moment, America stands at a dangerous crossroads. Divided. In pain. Hungry. Isolated. Wounded. Frightened. Trapped. Steeped in ignorance of each other, our own history, a churning of harmful “entertainment” mythology keeping us as far away from each other as possible. Most of us have no idea how we got here.

But I do.

I was born a slave. I have spent all my 63 years studying this problem, starting with earliest anthropology, through science, history, mythology and philosophy that drove these forces along the way. In that time, I learned a lot - most importantly about what we will need moving forward to survive and to thrive. I have a few loose theories and operating principles that can effectively begin to knit us into a greater whole again.

How do I share what I have learned? I can’t seem to find purchase, leverage, even a place to start with the limited remaining strength I have and sometimes it feels like a waste to have withstood, healed from, and learned so much from and about suffering to be unable to share it before I die - worse, there seems to be an urgent need for the lessons of these experiences, no matter how those lessons are used, whether the reader feels a little less like an individual failure - because they aren’t - or feels strong enough to reach across the fence with a dish of food for a neighbor they don’t yet know. If not now, when? If not me, who?

These days I measure out my strength by the teaspoon. And so far, I have not found an effective way in to share those lessons. One life at a time I have had conversations - usually it takes a couple of hours - where I lay out the history of my journey and permanently shift a person’s perception of themselves and those around them as though awakened from a lifelong nightmare. Suddenly, life - their life, and the lives of those around them - is full of problem solving potential. I watch people open their eyes, a little or a lot, as though they had been walking around in a coma - or brainwashed - all their lives.

Un-brainwashing, frankly takes 4 sessions. First, reality of slavery. Second, reality and true hope of human nature. Third, all our wounds. Fourth, sharing our stories to heal. How long those 4 sessions take usually depends on where we start in the conversation. If they don’t know my story at all, each session takes an hour. If you know my history, about half that.

The best brain washing example I have of this is that we can absolutely trust that the game is rigged and that The house always wins. But we have been utterly lied to about what that means. The house isn’t your boss, or the king, or the emperor. As Ecclesiates points out, those are human vanities. The house is life itself, and in the end, no matter what we egotistical humans think, life always wins. But even better, life is overwhelmingly imbalanced in our favor.

There is so much natural resistance to self destruction, both in nature itself and the design of consciousness, that even the most desperately sensitive, in pain, canaries in our collective coal mine - the suicidal and addicted - must try repeatedly to destroy themselves and still, against all odds the human body and spirit holds out for the possibility of redemption. Of compassion. Of reconnection. The people who raised you to believe we live in a dog eat dog, every man for himself world lied to you - sometimes for generations - to exploit you. Because this is not how human beings were designed to survive. We survive, and have aided the survival of all life if you pay attention to aboriginal peoples, for hundreds of thousands of years in every habitat on the planet by cooperating and caring for each other and where we live. On some level, we all know this to be instinctively true.

There are people who will charge you a lot of money to tell you that life is empty and meaningless, and that we need to let go of our need to make meaning. As though the Tao could be force fed in a 4 day weekend, but that is another lie.

We seek meaning, each for ourselves. And if we keep seeking, we find it. But that niggling feeling that there is something wrong with the world? That is not a lie. That is your intuition callling you home.

Calling you to the moment, to the table, your neighbor, to a world of balance that existed before you were born and can return to once the profit mongers are out of the way.

I need people to understand the vast difference between being a wageslave or craftsman of any type. All work has value. There are only two important questions. What are we making and who are we making it for?

Our ancestors and childrens’ children? Or some illusion of protecting ourselves from the natural consequences of existence? To achieve an imbalance in nature so great that others must suffer so we thrive, or live in perpetual anxiety without time left over to live a life? Or do tasks that serve no one and nothing, when we all know how much important work there is to be done in every area.

We all know we can’t keep fucking around anymore and everyone can do something.

Together we can build any world we choose.

So what will we choose?

I am alone. I feel as though I live with the love of lifesaving cultural and psychological antibodies to my diseased culture and those antibodies will die with me because I cannot share them. Not in any scalable way.

Though my spirit is strong, my body is exhausted. I am not a leader - primarily because my disability prevents me from showing up often and consistently.

Lastly, like everyone else, I have to live in this culture. Unlike everyone else, I cannot repair relationships with my family or community. I have none.

Over the years I have invested most of myself in an attempt to create a family of choice. When times were easier, these gatherings which provided support for everyone involved, over time succumbed to outside economic pressure. As our cost of living increases, we are often forced to migrate away from our support systems.

One by one, each of my “permanent” local family has been forced to leave. One to a cabin in the mountains , one to Bremerton, one is currently in San Diego - but can and does - work anywhere, two to Taiwan, two to Florida, one to North Carolina, several to Portland, one to Eastern Oregon. At the moment I am staring down the barrel of whether or not my last, best friend in the area will be forced by conditions to migrate.

My tiny circle of correspondence friends around the world stay in touch, but cannot be gathered around the table. I cannot hold them. I cannot hold their children.

I am clear that I am wealthy in my friendships. But, even those who love me deeply will tell you that while “worth it” I am “a lot”. How could I not be? So I have learned, over time, to share pieces of myself in short, even timed periods, so I don’t overburden those who love me. But with each passing day, there is one less person I can authentically share even a piece of myself with. Given how I was raised, community is not a luxury for me. It is a psychological necessity. It is for all of us. I just happen to be another “canary in the coal mine”.

For those unfamilar with the phrase, coal miners used to need caged canaries to keep them alive. If the canary died, they knew their lives were in danger from unseen gas. That’s one of the things neurodivergents offer society. Ignore their sensitivity, which is your community early warning system, at your peril.

It hits me first, and it hits me hardest. And all the personal resilience in the world cannot replace a village, especially at 63. A village, by the way, that I painstakingly built around me over the years that the culture has been irresistibly stripping away from me for a profit - just like the rest of us.

Unlike the rest of us, though, as the “canary” I now wake up vomiting every morning. I know this is happening, to a greater or lesser degree to all of us. I know how intentional it is - because the moment we reach across that fence and start sharing - we immediately begin to see how profoundly wealthy we are in time, talent and resources and that we do not need them, and especially not the profit tax they extract from us, because we had everything we needed all along.

We need each other! The rest of it are details specific to our local communities and easily within our ability to manage and create solutions from.

What am I supposed to do, fit to bursting with all this survival knowledge which, outside the periodic 9 year old with a hungry mind, I have no one to share it with?

I have no credentials. No position. No proof even that I know what I know, though I could document that proof but I would need another 63 years. I have been told that I have a duty to share my story, as long as it no longer damages me to do so. It no longer hurts to share, in fact it is a great joy. My faith has grown into the foundation of unshakable truths that heal - that I cannot seem to find a way to share.

I have attempted many things and abandoned those attempts, mostly because the pull of the dominant culture was too strong. More than once recently I have had one of these perception changing conversations with desperate friends in communities where they felt utterly isolated, only to gain the ground that no matter what their background, the neighbor across the fence lives with as much need and fear and pain as you do. You need them and they need you!

I decided that I would go to a small town and offer to give a faith based talk. I could not find an in without an established program. Ok. Keep trying. I think I can do one “talk” a month about these experiences in one day with multiple breaks and a meal I prepare ahead of time with help. I can start with 6 volunteers. I can test pilot a community program and offer it at neighborhood community centers in Seattle to start.

But if I exhaust myself in the attempt, in overcomplicating for lack of response, I will destroy myself. Once established, lack of response seems unlikely. When I was younger, in my 30s, I refused to have my holidays ruined by dysfunctional family or lack thereof, I would host “orphan” holiday parties. I would invite 10, and somehow 25 showed up. There was always room, there was always enough food. It was always a joyful rededication to new cultural traditions. But those people have moved away. And I am an old woman. I cannot throw a feast without at least a second set of hands.

I have considered introducing my stories at monthly “longer table” events. Should I try? Is it worth trying? I am not strong enough for a podcast, nor do I care to appear on camera. But the substack only scratches a tiny layer of people who have learned or been told that my work inspires them. I know that, long term, my greatest leverage will come from the short fiction and novels I am writing now - but that impact will not be felt for years, probably decades. Not fast enough for what we face right now.

I have heard a lot lately about human attention span, and again I would politely call bullshit. Have we missed the flocking to bingeable stories, or 1000 page books with compelling stories? If one loses the attention of the audience, one never acquired it. Humans are starved for meaning that actually serves their lives and the lives of their communities. I have no fear of holding an audience’s attention.

But how do I find my way in front of them?

Every week, mostly, I dribble out a bit of this story. Every week I get direct letters telling me how much these columns mean to the people who read them - you. Please do take a moment to write to me and tell me your thoughts on these matters.

Many speak about this metaphorically. I am not. I am being literal. Starting small, I want to bring together folk who would not otherwise meet, and therefore never learn how much they have in common and how much they could benefit from shared support and expertise. Most fuctional community support groups, the oldest ones, have learned that diversity enhances the ability to respond to every given situation, if you allow those within the group with specific expertise to take the lead in that area for that project. But first you have to build the group based on the people nearest you.

And, frustrating as it has been for me, unlike those who grow up in climates that teach them they need each other to survive, the west coast lags in this regard because of a stubborn quality of individualism and relative comfort that has not been challenged by circumstance as yet. That has changed.

And we must change with it.

https://www.stewardshipoflife.org/2020/08/building-a-longer-table/

https://saiditwho.com/who-said-build-a-longer-table-not-a-higher-fence/

https://eastoregonian.com/2023/10/20/our-view-build-a-longer-table-not-a-higher-fence/

https://quotememaybe.com/we-you-have-more-than-you-need-build-a-longer-table-not-a-higher-fence-unknown/

For the last 10 days I have spent every day on the phone with medical, dental, and insurance bureaucracies. Most people working in these systems are tired and overworked, and yet I have been overwhelmingly grateful for how helpful nearly every person I talk tries to be. No matter how many times I get bounced from one department to the next, it is easy to tell that everyone is just doing the best they can in tough times.

I don’t like it, but I even understand delivering medical care without compassion for a profit motive. It’s not personal. We aren’t even people to them.

I understand all of the frustrations and pain we are all feeling right now in regards to medical care, and trust me, everyone is feeling it.

But today I ran across a new thing. After talking to multiple departments, at multiple agencies, finding our doctor had referred us to an office that did not provide the procedure required, the insurance company told me that all that needed to be done was to reissue the referral to a new clinic. I spoke to a nurse at my primary care’s office and she said she would send the fax that morning. I had all the codes, the procedure had finally been approved by the insurance company, I had the phone numbers, the diagnosis numbers - I had everything anyone might have needed to fill in the blanks for a new order and fax it all gathered together in one email.

When I called at 2, the referral had not yet been faxed. So I went back to the doctor’s office to see if the fax got held up or mislaid. My husband may need surgery for his shoulder, and the sooner he gets it the sooner we will know if he has to retire to keep his insurance or if he can recover before his sick time is out. But the new person on the phone had no interest in helping me whatsoever. She told me that it had to go back to the doctor, back through the insurance company and start what could be a three month process all over again. It has already been almost 3 months that he hasn’t been able to work. I doubt if she was being observed, she just took an opportunity to be cruel because she could be. I grew up with sociopaths, I know one when I see one. They are bullies who prey on the vulnerable when they think they can get away with it. And this woman bullied patients when no one was looking.

We have had the same clinic for 15 years. I have faced ageism, sexism, disbelief and having to bring my husband in to advocate for me - but nothing remotely like this. This petty tyrant had her fiefdom, and she knew she could do what she liked, within bounds, to make things harder on people. She didn’t have to. She just chose to.

Thankfully, most people in the world don’t use their sphere of influence to hurt others, which brings me to the subject of today’s column: bosses who take you under their wing and mentor you, and petty tyrants who torture anyone in their path as long as they can get away with it.

Think of Jeff Bezos saying “I want my employees to come to work every day afraid”...

I had a natural gift for sales. When I was a kid with 4 paper routes in new territories, I was assigned the task of getting my neighbors to subscribe. When I came in and told my boss that I was only able to enroll 80%, he was floored. The other kids were coming in closer to 20%.

This followed me around a bit. When there were dessert selling contests at restaurants I worked at, I got disqualified because no one else would try if I always won.

My once husband told me that I could go back to school when I made enough money to pay for my half of the mortgage on the house I never wanted, and whatever money was left over could be applied to school.

I got that job, by sheer force of will and hope. I applied for a commission sales job for a high end stereo store with every card stacked against me. They didn’t hire women, and they never hired anyone without an electronics degree. I told them that, though I didn’t have a degree in economics, I could learn technicalities. The advantage I had over the others was that I was a musician and I was a story teller. People in Louisville, Ky didn’t buy expensive stereos for tech specs, they bought machines because they loved music.

Loving music, down to your bones, that was something I understood. I made them a deal. Hire me for 6 months. If I am not your best sales person in 6 months, I will leave quietly and not even file for unemployment.

I started by studying with the repair man in the shop. I learned what everything did and why. Not the numbers, anyone can quote numbers, but the actual mechanics involved. Why one machine out performed another. How some engineering didn’t need to be expensive to solve expensive problems.

In 6 months, not only was I his best sales person, but I was better than the rest of the staff combined.

I owe this success largely to my manager, a boss who took me under his wing to teach me how to survive. Remember, at the ripe old age of 20, I had only ever done manual labor and I never had a professional job in a “man’s” world. What’s worse, I knew little about the south and at first my vocabulary and dress made me seem arrogant and unapproachable. These things changed pretty quickly, but I found myself on more than one occasion behind the store getting my butt handed to me for some social unwritten rule or expectation that I had violated. In fact, though the crew swore like sailors in back, I made the mistake of offhandedly swearing, in that way one does when something is unimportant, in front of a family that I shocked to badly, my boss pulled me back to the back room again and yelled at me so loudly they could hear from inside the store. Of course, he wasn’t actually even angry, he was just trying to teach me to pay attention to the culture around me and how my behavior affected others.

I learned more from him about how to survive in the world than any single person, and I owe him and his family more than I could possibly repay.

I could tell you all about the wonders of design and engineering I learned, but what was most important was that once I found the type of music a person loved and what budget they were on, I could put together something that would bring that music into their homes in clear, clean beauty that filled their hearts and souls. I knew the power of music, and I connected with people over it. After hiring me, the owner of the store decided that the key to my success might be diversity. He hired a black man, another woman, a gay man - but that was not what people were responding to, though I applaud his efforts. The worst part is that every 6 months someone less qualified than me would be promoted above me as an assistant manager and just get in the way of me competently doing my job.

Finally, in frustration, I complained to my mentor. “Does he think that I am just lucky? That I don’t have skill and there is no method to my madness? Why don’t I ever get promoted? Why doesn’t my work get recognized?” I asked.

“Because you don’t demand it,” he replied.

Over the following month, he proceeded to coach me in how many men actually get their jobs.

“God give me the confidence of a mediocre white man”, it’s been said, but frankly that had a lot to do with it. So I prepared my case and made an appointment with the owner and the general manager, my mentor.

Point by point I laid out the case for my own competence and how it came from study - lots of it - of the entire inventory in the store, the ability to do back of the napkin math in my head and quote a price that was reasonable with a good profit margin on the spot. I never needed to discount equipment, because I could always find something high performance enough within their budget to get them started, or help them build from there. I was kind to children looking at boom boxes that the others ignored, but those children then came back with their parents. And there was so much more involved. Teaching people how to use their machines, keeping track of birthdays, graduations and anniversaries of my regular clients. People came in looking to see me alone, and kept coming back bringing friends.

At the end of the conversation I utterly acted out a rehearsed scene when I stood up and slammed my hands down on the owner’s desk and asked for my own store to run.

“Well,” he said like the good old boy he was, “I was waiting for you to work up the guts to do that! Congratulations!”

Apparently I passed the good old boy test.

I didn’t pass all of the tests. I was invited to one poker game, but although I cannot even guess anything about cards, I can read people. I started racking up the money pretty quickly, but I was also tired. I knew it was rude to get up from the table without giving folks a chance to earn their money back, so I started playing to lose. That only made things worse because then they started trying to figure out my secret strategy - which of course did not exist - but I made even more as they placed increasingly risky bets. Finally, I begged off, leaving my winnings on the table. Needless to say I was not invited back to poker night.

Mostly it was a good experience. I became a skilled sales trainer, a skill I could almost always find employment for. I was adopted by the community. After an emergency appendectomy, I woke to a room full of flowers and my mentor’s wife took me home to recover until I could go back to work.

In Kentucky, I was lonely. There was no one to talk to. No one to date. I moved into a neighborhood on the black edge of town and though I got scolded for it, on Sundays I was privileged to stand in the back of the church and listen to some of the most beautiful gospel music I had ever heard.

When it came time to leave and go home to Detroit, I never realized that I left a Sarah sized hole behind me, which I had done more than once in my life. It never occurred to me that I would matter so much to anyone that they would miss me. Funny that. Eventually I learned otherwise.

Once in Detroit, looking for new work as a sales manager, I found that I couldn’t find part time work as a sales manager, only full time. Full time work as a sales manager is often 60 hours a week leaving no time for school or writing.

At which point I started charting out the math of how much I earned as a waitress at 16, and how much I was earning now, and accounting for unpaid overtime. I realized that during those years my rate of pay hadn’t changed at all. I started looking into my merit scholar school peers, only to find out that out of 10 of us, only two managed to graduate. They ran out of money just like I did. Of the two who graduated, one came from rich parents and lied on all of his application forms, and one dealt drugs to make enough money to graduate while also working in a high end restaurant. It never occurred to me to cheat. Why would it? That was where I came from, not who I was. I did not game the system.

I continued with my charting, mapping out all the specific contributions or detriments to one’s start in life. So many less points back for being a minority. Less points for being a woman. Less points for being born underclass. Less points for being from a crime family. More points for being white, more points for which class you were born into, more points for being smart without a learning disability. Less points for being disabled, and so on. By the time I completed the chart, I had mapped out the glass ceiling of what one might be able to achieve in one lifetime based on these factors. For example, Obama could be president because he was raised middle class, by a white mother, was brilliant, went to a good school and he was a centrist. He and Michelle faced horrible racism, which is part of how Trump got elected, but the country was not ready to elect a woman for president, white, black or otherwise.

Some ceilings could be broached, others were harder.

In my lifetime, I have seen more progress in some areas than I would have expected, but in other areas things have gotten much worse. The class divide went exactly according to predictions I was making in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was claiming that the government was the problem. All I saw was a sudden power vacuum. If we are incapable of governing ourselves, who will take over that role in our society?

I think now we know where all that was heading, as bit by bit the institutions that support our lives were defunded until they could not be effective, then shut down because without funding the Republicans proved the point that they could not be effective. A self fulfilling prophecy.

As crack swept through Detroit, I found myself living in a home full of addicts that I had to close down. For about a week I was homeless. I rented a room, moved my guitar and my manuscripts in. After she had taken my money, she met me at the door with a man who had a gun in his hand. She had a lighter held just beneath my manuscripts. I took my stories and walked away, but there was nowhere left to go. The addicts had used up my bank account cleaning up their mess. I had tried to be responsible. Having nowhere else to turn, I contacted my ex-landlady and asked for shelter for 2 more weeks while I figured something out.

I got really lucky. An acquaintance who slept on our couch when his wife divorced him heard I needed a place to stay. He offered me the Murphy bed in his apartment. It took me a year to get back on my feet.

That is part of what I mean when I talk about failing backwards. Of all of the kids in that house, I was the least equipped to fail. I had nothing. No assets. No car. No money. No family.

Were it not for this unexpected kindness, I might not have made it through the winter. The human race has not survived through competition. The phrase “dog eat dog” is pretty stupid when one considers dogs work in packs, even with humans. The human race survived to evolve because we cared for each other. There is evidence of caring for the sick, the crippled and the elderly in even the earliest archilogical sites for the human race.

Kindness is our superpower. Again and again I had my nose rubbed in that lesson, smart as I thought I was. Kind beats smart almost every time, unless of course those brains are combined with kindness in the service of building something together.

With the help and encouragement - nee, mentorship - of other creative professionals I happened to meet, I decided that if I had learned enough to sell other people’s things, then I could sell my own work. At age 27, I finally felt like my work was good enough to share and began the long journey into becoming a professional writer.

I had amazing people help me and support me. I also faced laughter, derision and mockery. It wasn’t terribly important. Over time, with help of those around me, I learned to grow up, to be of service, I learned some humility, and perhaps most importantly I learned multiple colloquial vocabularies and how to convey complex ideas in simple language.

If I had to measure the tyrants I faced with the good people who came into my life, I think the ratio was something like 80 to one. We remember the bad ones, but truly, every day I count the blessings of those who helped me survive, mature and get here. I give back when and where I can. I try to be as patient and kind as possible.

I stand up to bullies wherever possible. I just haven’t encountered a stone cold, down to the bone sadist in awhile. It’s ok, after I got past it, it was a good reminder that those gatekeepers are also part of the petty fiefdoms that keep us in our place. One tin pot ruler at a time.

Everyone I have ever met has had these experiences, and in times when work is scarce, sometimes we think we have no choice but to endure toxic environments. But we do have a choice. Because there are alternatives to the toxic space. There are employee owned coops. There is union organizing and collective bargaining. There are options in the future. I will start to discuss what those options might be.

Just remember one thing. No one can make you a slave without your consent. Even if it is only temporary, we can be free in our hearts until we make that freedom a reality.

I know because I have walked that path, with many beside me.

And if it is your time to begin that path, I urge you to join the rest of us who are starting to see that we are one human race, one tribe, one community of working people facing overwhelmingly rich and powerful people who seem to have all the odds in their favor.

Until we elect the next FDR. Until we tax the billionaires 95% like we did in the 1950s, the most prosperous era in our nation’s history.

Invest in each other, in your neighbors, in your communities.

Your employer is not your family. Work ethic is gaslighting and manipulation so we won’t ask for better conditions.

Move towards owning what you make in so far as humanly possible and encourage your neighbors to do the same. This is our land. These are our homes. And no matter how many equity companies come and buy homes that belonged to our parents’ generation and rent them back to us does not mean they actually own our homes.

These are numbers on paper. Made up numbers at that.

They only mean something as long as we continue to believe the lies that they tell us.

We build this country. We create productivity. We deserve a substantial dividend and reinvestment in the communities that made these companies possible.

And it is time they started paying their fair share.

“I want everyone to be afraid when they come to work.”

Really? Because what happens when all the hundreds and thousands of frightened people are no longer afraid, but angry, and show up on your doorstep asking where you put the wealth you siphoned off their efforts? And what do you intend to do about the mess you made?

I hope you have good answers.

Because if you don’t, you may not like the ones we come up with for you.

Remember, there will always be more of us than you. We can feed each other and ourselves. In the final analysis, we don’t actually need you. You just created an illusion that we did.

Time to wake up.

The Pyramid Economy: Class and Failing Backwards

I attended college in the upper peninsula of Michigan, one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen and I am certain the beauty of the place played into my decision to attend there. That, and they had a superb honors English program that I was lucky enough to participate in. I had amazing professors, and as I have said before, I had a hungry, hungry mind and peppered them with constant questions during office hours. Instead of one college advisor in the department, I had three.

I was dyslexic, I could only read the shape of words so I could not spell, and I had never been taught formal grammar. The only reason I was placed in the honors English class was that after 4 years of competitive speaking and debate in High School, when presented with an entrance exam that required an unprepared essay, in one hour, based on a random news article - apparently mine was swiftly and well constructed. That I was trained in, if nothing else. So my teachers believed me to be talented, but called me “lazy” which was not uncommon with learning disabilities at that period of time. Also, prior to word processors, an essay that took me an hour to write would take me 40 hours to type, and the final result was always a wrinkled mess of splotches and whiteout.

None-the-less, I got good grades and stayed on the deans list. But again, the cultural references I was exposed to had little relationship to me. Reading Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton at 18 left a pretty clear impression that the only place for intellectual women was depression and suicide, after being rejected by male peers, relatives and mentors who never came. The female characters in the novels we were reading were mere cardboard fantasies for the male protagonists, for good or ill. A whole world of literature opened other cultures, albeit European, and that at least stretched my mind.

But invisible classism was ever present in a school made up largely of smart kids from factory workers or engineers from Detroit. Most of my friends were merit scholars like me from my own highschool. Unlike at an Ivy League school, there were few reminders that not all of us were the same. When in college, I worked in the library, as a 3rd shift waitress, and as a model for the art department so that I could work and sleep at the same time. I didn’t have enough money to cover the weekend cafeteria meal plan, so I would collect money from the other kids in the dorm and spend the weekend cooking a huge feast, usually Italian, that would feed everyone Sunday dinner, when the cafeteria wasn’t open. Those groceries went into the feast, but also fed me for the weekend. I worked in restaurants from age 15 to 30 and made sure that if I had to do manual labor, I would add a skill to my knowledge base as well. I learned to cook many types of cultural cuisines and was embraced by many minority communities, which enriched my life greatly.

But I remember one class in particular, while we were reading the book “False Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisons” by Malcolm Braly. Braly, who started as a petty thief surviving alone, graduated to small crimes, reform schools, larger crimes, and eventually in and out of prison. Braly became something of a literary darling, as he wrote fairly honestly about his childhood, criminal and prison experiences and what he witnessed. As the professor was walking around the room with the book that talked about the trap of the cycle of poverty and crime, turned to the only black girl in the room and said:

“You must know what this is like”

The dark skinned young woman in her cheerleader uniform, complex braids and gold nails spoke to him with acid in her voice.

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” she said. “I’m from Grosse Point.”

If you don’t happen to know, Grosse Pointe, Michigan is perhaps the richest suburb in the state. It runs along the lakeshore with an unrestricted view of Lake Michigan and the waterfront park beyond. Most don’t know this, but since Grosse Pointe and Detroit border each other, there is a brick wall, as well as a tall, deep hedge that separates the two communities. Those of us who didn’t live in Grosse Pointe, but still liked to drive along the lakeshore, were frequently pulled over by the Grosse Pointe police. Color was not a factor. We used to call it “Driving while poor.”

Invisible, on the other side of the class room, I sat with my tennis shoes held together with duct tape, in the middle of the freezing winter, barely even a winter coat, as my racist professor assumed that this cyclical suffering was something only his black student would inherently understand.

I had been a slave. I had lived through cycles of poverty, abuse, addiction and crime, in my own life, and every generation before me as far back as I can trace my family.

These days I hope to god we are beginning to see that color and ethnicity have been means of separating us from our working neighbors. But back then, people made different assumptions. Stupid assumptions, but more people seem to be learning better by now and that was 45 years ago. It’s no excuse for the systemic racism even at the university level, but as long as we continue to reach out to each other - those barriers will eventually melt away. The human race is one race, one tribe. We need to learn that to evolve and survive.

Perhaps now we will. But not then.

The pompous professor assumed the only black student in the class would have an understanding of this lifestyle, while I sat a quietly perfect example of what he described. He was proud of the fact that in a competitive class of honors students, he only gave our one A per year. He kept pushing and pushing at me to write about my childhood suffering, but I wasn’t interested in giving him access to my personal horror porn. Instead I plucked a minor female character from one of the novels we were assigned. Even though the man in the story was the hero, and he painted his lover as near evil, to me he seemed manipulative and abusive because he could not even see her outside her inability to meet his needs.

So I wrote my final essay from her point of view, walking away from an abusive relationship with the first pride she has felt in her life. She walked away from an apartment she will never return to the memory of, a ringing phone where she will never again answer the call of “but babe, I need you.”

I got my A. Apparently I surprised him with something he had never considered. He promised me that I would be “good” one day.

It was not until I returned to Detroit that I found my sister writers in voices like Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. These women came through a far more visceral struggle than the rarified air of Ivy League scholars.

There was also a time when I sang the blues quite a bit. I would close my eyes and black music would pour out of my heart. I once auditioned for “The Paul Robeson” players in my hometown, and I was called back for a second round of auditions. That was a pretty sweet compliment!

But once there, the director pulled me sweetly aside and told me that I had the voice, the heart, the soul, and then he laughed because there were only so many spaces to fill in the troupe.

“Sarah,” he said gently “I hate to be the one to tell you, but honey, you’re not black.”

I guess I didn’t have Meminem’s fight in me. I was fighting a different kind of internal battle. I was on a path towards peace.

Even then, I knew that people made assumptions based on appearance, but that class was sometimes an almost invisible factor that changed the trajectory of the lives of the young. If you are underclass, one misstep and you could be homeless - I know, it happened to me. Working class, one misstep and you are in debt. Middle class, and you might be able to recover from a misstep, especially with help from family. And so it goes.

People look at us and they presume to know our story by our surface when we are so often wrong. When I was in college, I joined a group therapy session for the first time. I had never had therapy and thought it wise to begin the process given what I had been through. Over the course of 8 weeks, as I listened to other young adults wrestle with important decisions like coming out of the closet, or being away from home for the first time, or being afraid of making a career decision that their parents would not respect, or trying to cope with body image issues - these seemed relatively normal young adult questions to be searching for answers for.

During these sessions, I said little other than to offer empathy and compassion. In comparison, what I was carrying around in me was more akin to a nuclear arsenal, filled with every form of horror imaginable, and I did not think it fair to place the burden of my stories on the shoulders of these otherwise relatively innocent young people.

We cannot help but bring where we came from with us wherever we are, for good or ill.

The therapist, perhaps through inexperience, perhaps through a sense of overconfidence, decided to hypnotise me during the last group therapy session. She accidentally unlocked the memory of my first rape at age 5. I was curled up in a catatonic fetal position on the floor, trembling and terrified. At that moment, she decided to close the session and left me alone as the rest of the students, embarrassed, also left the room.

I don’t know what her intention was at that point, but I was having a silent nervous breakdown right then and there. One kind, compassionate student bent down and draped his long wool coat over my shoulders. He walked me through the fresh air, out into the snow, to his ballet glass. He gently set me down next to the piano as I felt the healing vibration of music from the instrument into my bones as he completed his class. Gradually, I came back to the present.

After class, he walked me to his apartment, sliced fresh bread and jam, a cup of warm tea, a pair of his own shoes, too big for me - but whole - with socks wadded up in the toes so they would fit.

He smiled at me from ear to ear and said cheerfully:

“Let’s pick up a couple of AK47s, kill your parents, get your dogs and your flute back, shall we?”

I felt more seen in that moment than ever in my life. He became my instant best friend and remains so to this day. Over more than 40 years we have strengthened and loved each other. He was my first family member, the first person to make a permanent commitment to me. Human beings are truly remarkable creatures.

You see, the kids, even the therapist, from their relatively safe existences could not even imagine what my life might have been like, and god forbid, if they had, it may have traumatized them at that age. But my friend, with family betrayals of his own, plus generational wounds from the Holocaust, growing up in Detroit, where life is not as easy as other places in the quaint small towns and cities in Michigan at the time. My friend had both seen suffering in his family, and known it in his own life. When he saw it in me, how could it not resonate?

But I find that among minority communities this is a common strength. I do not generally believe that suffering creates character, but rather that surviving suffering requires character. It requires a willingness to get up, again and again, after falling. Caring for our neighbors, caring for our sick, caring for our dying - because nobody is coming to save us. If you are poor you have to take care of each other. You won’t survive if you don’t.

One of my professors had been a monk who quit seminary to get married. His love of language was second only to his love of life and its creator. When Ronald Reagan was elected, Reagan canceled scholarships for poor kids like me, and I ran out of money to finish school. The boy I was dating at the time, and the first person to tell me that he loved me, said that if I helped him get a job as a teacher in Kentucky, we could get married and he would support me until I could finish school. The boy never kept his promise, though I did help him get the job. He decided we needed to buy a house instead. I did not stay, but that is another story.

This sweet professor thought I was leaving school to get married because I was pregnant. He told me that he and his wife would adopt my baby, because he thought I had a gift that should be nurtured. He pulled a book of e.e.cummings from the shelf, opened it and handed it to me.

“I see your simple, clear voice. What you write should not be lost to us,” he said simply. I laughed, and reassured him. It never occurred to him to ask, if they had a spare room, for them to adopt me for a few years.

You see, those of us who know suffering, know to offer help. Love God. Love neighbor, as James Talarico likes to say.

There can be joy in that. A joy in making a table big enough for everyone to sit at. To share whatever we have with each other and celebrate the fact that we have made it to another dawn. Music. Dance. Art. Stories. We come together to share and make culture that makes us wealthy and keeps us going with love and connection.

How sad, I think sometimes, when I see neighbors with more who are afraid of being taken advantage of, so they don’t reach out to connect, or respond to outreach when it comes their way.

All those individual little houses, with individual little screens, with individual budgets, with parents outside the community trying to “do it all” by themselves and get more burned out by the year as their resources get spread more and more thinly.

But because we need little, and share much, we face less of that pressure.

No amount of money in the world, no investment in medicine or therapy can replace the kindness of one young man draping a wool coat over another suffering human being.

These moments transform lives, every day. And in each of us is the power of many such moments.

Study our history. We have all been the migrant farmers. We’ve all lived in Hooverville shacks because of the rich and powerful. But we also came together and overcame those things. The rich and powerful have been looking for a way to regain dominance in society since they lost their footing in the gilded age and we came together to elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, with his wife, transformed out country out of a depression to a powerhouse of service, enginuity, engineering, schooling, food, security - all the things needed for a decent human life. Oh, and he taxed the rich.

Let me be used up by the end of my life. Let me give every gift I had, every love I felt, fed every person I could, told every story in my soul, sung every song with my friends even when my voice got old and raspy.

Let me push back against the greedy and share all I have learned.

Before I go, let everything be done. Everything be said.

No regrets.

If I have that, I will die a wealthy woman indeed.

The Pyramid Economy That Keeps Us Divided

I recently listened to a lecture about the tiny pyramids within pyramids that maintain long term control over any society. I usually keep track of my reference material, and I am sorry to admit that I could not find it again. However, anyone who has worked any entry level job will recognize this dynamic, as well as people who referred to the psychology of the servant in charge of the house, often the most supportive of the master, as we discuss in US slavery, but we can see has been part of society since there have been class stratification. The superb film “Remains of the Day” with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins reflects a conflict between the woman who runs the household and the chief butler. They have a modest love between them, but no time to explore it in “The Remains of the Day”, but what breaks their friendship is an incident when the house manager hides two young jewish girls on staff, and the lord of the manner, an English Nazi, insists on turning them out. Thompson quits, but Hopkins trusts his lord to know best, and stays loyal. Thompson is horrified that Hopkins cannot even conceive of his master doing a horrific thing. And this is how power systems are maintained.

Each little manager of each little fiefdom complicit in the sins at the top.

I have experienced this personally, but think in terms of small hierarchies. Churches, schools, entry level jobs, police - any place where people feel that rules and control are more important than the chaos of curiosity and independence.

For example, it has been well established that young children expressing strong feelings - tantrums for example - develop more emotional strength and resilience when parents allow them to feel age appropriate feelings and assist them in processing when needed.

Almost all native cultures that I know of have some gentle version of this, but the modern example I have is that a friend of mine remembers having a tantrum in a department store because his mother ignored his third request for a toy they could not afford. So, my friend threw a horrible, screaming tantrum in the middle of the aisle. His mother walked away and ignored him. She didn’t even watch him kick and yell. Eventually he exhausted himself, calmed down, and trailed after his mother. He never did it again.

So I would like to start at my own earliest memory of pitting people who have more in common than not, into micro-divisions that keep us from banding together and throwing the monarchs under the bus.

My earliest form of this training came in the 1967 riot when we found ourselves on Gratiot Avenue in the middle of the fighting as my mother was driving us home. In the car I, at almost 5, and my two toddler brothers, were not afraid. It didn’t occur to us, because mother wasn’t afraid. Instead, she watched two sets of young men with sticks and bats, on the verge of attacking each other. I don’t remember the race of either group, only that it was a face off. Mother, all 5 feet, 98 pounds of her, had a strong singers voice. At the top of her lungs she announced to them:

“Stop this! Your mothers would be ashamed of you!. Go home.”

They woke up, a mob woken out of its stupor of anger. One by one, they lay down their makeshift weapons and walked away, shaking their heads.

My next lesson came when my seventh grade history teacher of world history had only taught European history starting from the Roman empire. The whole world. Really?

So I went to him, frustrated, and simply said, “I know you are teaching from a textbook, but if I am to believe everything I am being taught, then white people are responsible for civilization and every invention since its founding. The logical conclusion would be that white people are smarter and inherently superior, but my mother taught me better when I was 4. So what am I not being taught?”

The history teacher laughed. He was so happy that anyone had actually asked that question. Since I was ahead of my classmates, he sent me to the library with a list of things to read.

From there, I explored the world of Egypt, Africa, India, Asia, the Polynesian Islands, Australia, the North and South American continents and all of the different ways human beings brilliantly adapted uniquely to their environments. Different cultures were each more and less specialized in different areas depending of the needs of those environments.

What I think is most important to notice, however, is that while modern human beings existed in bands that cared for each other, their children, their sick, their disabled, their dying and honored their dead for two million years. Although there are disagreements on the precise time, pretty much all anthropologists will agree that what we think of as modern civilization, as we currently define it, about ten thousand years ago, not based on our current extraction economies.

However, around five thousand years ago, human beings designed empires, the beginning of extracting resources of all kinds and moving it from one community, by force - not trade - to another, thereby extracting the wealth of one culture to enrich another.

There are multiple components to this type of system to get from there to where we are today, and in upcoming articles, I want to start with this one simple question:

Where, in your own life, have you been asked to force another person to do something against their own well being or wishes after being told it was a business necessity?

And then keep in mind that though, in the modern world, a corporation is legally a person, as a person it has no loyalty to you.

One of my earliest lessons about this in the work place came from a fellow black employee at a corporate retail store I worked at in Detroit in the 1980s. The concrete was falling from the stairs, ceilings and walls. There was as much dust on the floors as in a construction site. The store was a mess. If you were raised working in restaurants back in the day, waitstaff were paid 30% of minimum wage, but expected for the first 2 hours before work, and the last 2 hours after work, clean our place of work. Depending on your point of view, pride in place of work, pride in work ethic - or free labor.

In this store, the white workers believed the black workers just didn’t care about a clean workplace. No pride. But, since they were clean and professionally put together in every other way, this seemed an illogical conclusion.

So, gingerly, gently, I pulled aside a black colleague and simply asked the honest question: “What was the reason for the difference in behavior?”

“Oh,” she laughed,”you guys grow up believing that one day you will inherit the business. We know better. That’s never going to happen. That’s a carrot they hold in front of you to keep you dragging around that milestone for free labor.”

Wow.

Work ethic as a way to guilt underpaid workers to work harder.

Don’t make the team work harder because you are slacking.

You signed up to fight for freedom, but for now you are fighting for the brothers by your side. (You know, just in case you notice you have actually shed the blood of innocents and your brothers for oil, or, lithium, or fruit for Dole…)

The challenge is that, as long as individuals feel like the “kings” or simply sheriffs of their own little fiefdoms, the stores they manage, the homes they are head of, the idea that as long as they are not brown, they have someone they can look down upon.

And that’s how it starts.

Our training starts very early.

We have no training in our real history, or the history of our struggles as people and minorities.

All meant to build us into socially manageable widgets and not curious individuals capable of critical thinking. And to keep us separated from each other, pitted against each other.

We have attempted to address these issues by an over simplistic view of left or right or up or down, but I am finding new economic theories that seem far more sustainable and reasonable versus ideology.

But recently some new economic models have started to emerge, for example the idea of building an economy within the limits of your planetary resources and the best possible life for the greatest number of people. It is called a “donut economy”. And if you are interested, I suggest you start here:

Next, I will talk about how these little fiefdoms give us a false sense of security and power when, in truth, we have very little within this system until we join hands.

Be good to each other.

Love,

Sarah

Mandolin snowflakes falling on french horn ears

Yearning for harmony

And offering their best in return

A modest gift

An open hand

Filled with his

So many kisses

So much overtime

Stolen moments

Flurries or no

Blizzards leaving silent blankets of

The death most survive

Most people

Most plants

Most animals

But not all

Remembrance is important

In hope

In love

In grief

In doors

Most of all in doors

I open mine

To the unwanted

Unknown

And greet this year with such grace as I can

I will not let go of my own thread of hope

However thin

However fragile

There is more

And less to us

Than dust

But while we are here

And even when we are not

We offer

Such as we offer

And it is good

It is all good

The great debate between faith in anything

And a frozen heart

Pauses

For one night

Of candles

Joey sat near the living room fireplace. Amber embers glowed a little between the charcoal remains of the logs set from the fire the night before. The room’s furniture was white and covered with plastic sheaths. They had mean teeth from the little metal zippers that left marks if you had bare legs. The boy only knew that his grandma liked to check things with her white gloves. He didn’t know why. As long as he didn’t eat in the front room, nobody yelled at him.

Joey was in luck. There was an old rag rope rug in front of the fire, and nobody cared if he played there. He was wearing his favorite PJs, soft flannel with cartoons of a swinging spider monkey swinging through the trees. Joey loved his jammies. But no playing spider monkey at Grandma’s. There was a white Holiday tree near the fireplace. It was decorated with blue lights and garland and it threw sparkles around the room.

Lace and little wooden toys hung on the tree. Joey was dressing a pretty Barbi doll in an evening gown of garland. The gown shimmered in the half-light of dawn peeking through the draperies. He loved the delicate thing he was bending with his stubby fat fingers. Unlike the colored birds in the cabinet, this toy didn’t break when he dropped it or bent it. So far it was the best toy ever.

La la la, the little Barbi danced as the boy held her half-bent arms out between his paper-cut fingers. On the second finger of his left hand hung a bit of tape attached to colored paper that matched the explosion of paper and boxes that surrounded him.

“Stop that!” came a vocal spank from his grandmother midway down the stairs. His sister, Helen, stood behind Grandma. Helen’s face was red, with lots of tears as she made nonsense noise.

Joey was popping the head off the Barbi. He squished the head back on and held out the doll.

Helen snatched it. Her bawling softened to sniffles.

Grandma marched into the kitchen. Once grandma was gone, Joey thought for a bit.

After a few moments, he pulled out the yellow Tonka truck from behind him. He gestured to his sister, Helen, and grinned.

She put the Barbi in the yellow truck and they pushed it across the carpet. She squealed with joy.

They conspired and played together in front of the fire. Their father sat at the top of the stairs, content and even a little proud of his children.

Most monsters are not born, they are made. My step mother wasn’t born a monster. She was crafted and mishapen into an obscene parody of the woman she once wanted to be. Between her brutal, misogynist, ultra strict Calvinist family, the oppression she faced trying to find fairness in the workplace, the banks, and her faith community, any love or ambition she had survied in microscopic margins. As a young woman, she was dominated utterly by the males in her family, even the boys. She was expected to clean up after them, clean their rooms, never touch their treats, and not complain if they mistreated her.

The church she grew up in taught her women were inherently evil. When she left for a more moderate congregation, they excommunicated her and her family both disowned her and relied on her to make the hard decisions none of her siblings would make, like when her mother needed a nursing home, or her father needed a hospital. She was the strongest of them, and the most rejected by them. There was not much affection to be denied. There was no softness or nurturing in her life.

She had to get her father’s permission to open her own bank account with her own money, the home she bought with her own money was co-owned by her father. It was not until 1971 that she could apply for a credit card under her own name. She was a bookkeeper often hired to clean up years of piled up messes, only to be fired and have her job given to a male flunky once the mess had been curtailed.

She became a very angry, very bitter human being. She was so full of hate that she frightened those she disagreed with and dominated them through sheer force of will. She stood 5’11”, big boned, and constantly trying to diet herself into a more feminine version of herself which left her hungry and cranky at the best of times and never changed her weight.

“If I am going to hell, then I am going to take everyone with me,” was something she was fond of saying.

She hated black people. She hated men as a matter of principle, though she tolerated my father. He was handsome and charming, but ultimately not a partner, just another dependant she had to support, creating more resentment. My father was a salesman who dressed up every day and went to work, but never made any sales, hence any commissions. Busy work, but not useful to the family in any way.

So she relied on me for domestic support, as she had been expected to do.

At night she would sit on the playground swings and pretend to shoot children who were not there. She also hated children. It was understandable. She had never been allowed to be a child and so could not imagine nurturing one.

In many ways she had been deformed into something evil by the hateful people who raised her. They used code words that thinly veiled their white supremist world view, which also included a patriarchy that was, in her family, sacrosanct. She became a feminist, at great cost to her relationship with her siblings, and was still, as the youngest female, expected to care for her parents as they aged. I cleaned that old man’s house every Saturday for 10 years, and only after 10 years of dedicated kindness would he deign to speak to me. He called me a bastard and a devil child because my parents were divorced.

And so my step mother raised me as she had been raised. I was made to work to justify my existence as she had been. I was forbidden to do normal things like play, or listen to music or watch TV or use the phone. I was not even allowed to sing as I did chores

And yet I came back to her again and again, trying to cheer her, make her happy, give her what she so desperately needed, a little love, a little affection - anything hopeful. But I was in no position to deliver it in a way that broke through years of armor made from pain, try though I might. Have you ever been in a bad mood and utterly unable to be near someone cheerful? That was our dynamic. I was born cheerful and it was impossible to beat it out of me.

“Wipe that smirk off your face, or I will slap it off,” was something I was told more than once. I was not smirking, I had just found some small joy in something.

Enforcement of these rules were unspeakably cruel.

On more than one occasion I was beaten to unconsciousness. Those are stories for another time

But in one of my later healing exercises the goal was to go back to those memories and reimagine a better version of the past. While I could not do so with my father who was an unrepentant sociopath. But my stepmother was not cold and calculated like my father. She burned with a hot rage that never cooled. Every day a new trigger would set off her fury at the injustice of her life. Frankly, knowing how she was raised and how she was treated, I don’t blame her. I had to spend a lot of years unlearning my rage towards her.

Like her, I spent years being told I was evil when I was not. Like her, I grew up beaten for daring to ask questions, or responding to them. Responding to interrogation was dangerous, since no matter what I said I would be beaten for lying, so I cowered and repeated “I don’t know,” over and over again until I passed out.

But the exercise was forgiveness. How could I forgive a woman who had treated me like a prisoner of war in a concentration camp?

Because she had been raised as one. I read somewhere that countries that have extremely strict “spare the rod, spoil the child” cultures are far more susceptible to authoritarian leaders. It is in the family hierarchy that this abuse begins, only to be repeated again and again throughout society by the victims of that abuse.

Since I could not imagine her as loving, instead I imagined her as the person she might have grown into if I had been her mother. In hypnosis, I imagined raising her through every stage of development with love, praise, care and safe structure. When she emerged as an adult at the end of that journey, I then imagined how that woman would have raised me.

In real life there were slivers of light, two brief moments of unexpected kindness. Once, when I came home after delivering four paper routes of post Thanksgiving Christmas sales in the red wagon I dragged behind me, my clothes were frozen solid to my skin. Immediately she hurried me into the bathroom and started running a hot bath. Remember, this woman was raised to believe that baths were a waste of water, and I was only allowed to wash at the sink. She gently but quickly stripped the clothes from my shivering body and eased me into the tub, careful not to burn my skin.

That was the mother she wanted to be.

This is the woman who enrolled me in karate classes when I got bullied at school. She expressed it as disgust and called me a worm, but she also didn’t want me to be defenseless. She taught me to work long, hard hours as a way of life. From her I learned tremendous discipline that most of my peers didn’t have. Of course, they got to be children, but we get the gifts we get. She taught me how to balance a checkbook, and never to allow myself to be financially dependent on anyone, because no one was going to take care of me. She taught me that if I wanted to go to college, I had to get myself there, so I studied every spare moment I had. We raised thoroughbred dogs, and while caring for them was mostly a chore, at night they would surround me in a cuddle puddle in my bed. There was some warmth and contact with other living things. Mostly hard, survival lessons, but at least she was making sure I learned those lessons. When I left home I was pretty fearlessly standing on my own two feet, largely because I had finally learned to stand up to her.

But in my meditation I could extrapolate a softer version of the same person. She tried to get me ice skates once, but my ankles were too weak and narrow to use them. If she had been cared for as a child, it is likely that she would not have neglected my physical difficulties. Certainly she made sure the dogs went to the vet regularly. She would have been much like Marilla Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables. A little gruff, a little stern, a difficult time putting up with imaginative flights of fancy, but eventually warming to the miracle that this odd child brought into her life.

In my imagination, we gave that to each other. She gave me structure and stability when I had no home, and I gave her flowers and songs and stories and catastrophes that always turned out ok in the end.

I have had night terrors all my life. But now, I do not run from my father. In my dreams, that demon is at the end of my sword and the children are behind me. My step mother stands beside me, a warrior in her own right, heart finally whole and healed.

She was too far gone for me to give that to her in life. But if she is out there somewhere, perhaps she can visit the alternative land of my dreams and hopes for her happiness wherever she is now.

I emerged from her home broken in mind and body, but not heart. Most of my life was consumed with terrible healing from the consequences of those experiences. At 63 I finally feel that I am fully myself. I can express every part of me with compassion, conviction and without fear. And she is a part of me, even the scarred and broken parts. Scarred skin is tougher. Broken bones heal stronger. I will never fully escape the pain I live with, but it is by far overshadowed by joy, every day.

And I realize now that I love her for that part of me that is strong because of her. That part of me that always gets back up. That part of me that never gives up on anyone.

Ultimately, even her.

All is forgiven. For my sake, and for hers.

She was not born a monster.

She was made that way.

the growing empathy shortage

things your mom should’ve told you

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0092656625000704?via%3Dihub

https://www.psypost.org/trump-supporters-report-higher-levels-of-psychopathy-manipulativeness-callousness-and-narcissism/

https://baptistnews.com/article/trump-supporters-are-wired-differently-researchers-report/

Photo features Spencer Tracy in 1941 black and white remake of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, with Ingrid Bergeman and Lana Turner. Great film. Still holds up.

The stress that all of us live under at the moment can cloud our ability to experience the joy of living simply, but when we do, when we can remember - Oh, there lies bliss.

Like many, I live with severe chronic pain unseen by others. There was no sleep to be had for the last 3 days in a row and then, like a fever, the pain broke. I slept for 48 hours. When I woke, I was no longer exhausted, but I was not in pain either. Sitting in my writing chair, with a cat below the keyboard, I listen to Seth Watkins sing modern songs to old Irish rebel melodies and write away. David putters around the house packing for our upcoming vacation.

The room is warm. The blanket is a handmade gift from a friend’s mother who has adopted me a bit. David and I watched a lovely Chinese fable about a fictional empress of Chang An, a heroic tale of a girl who becomes a mother to and champion of her people. David and I are suckers for heroic stories of all kinds. We love a smart story where the good guys outwit evil.

I am not nauseous or hungry. I feel atypically whole and well of body and mind, as I remind myself that it is days like this that all the work is for. The work on my heart, my soul, my body, my marriage, my home, my art and my community. All for days of pure, simple joy.

Just like today.

Like a castle in the sand, the waves will carry it away and the work of tomorrow will build the next one, but this is what it is to be human. Make beauty from our gratitude and celebrate the love we nurture in the gardens of our loved ones.

This joy cannot be purchased. It cannot be ingested. It is the gift of living.

The early philosopher Baruch Spinoza found the nature of the entire universe both conscious and sacred, flowing according to its own nature which humans might discover and adapt to, but never control. He built the foundation of his own peace in the acceptance of reality, as it is. That is not to say we abandon work for change and for better futures, but that the moment we live in is now.

So the place to look for the joy of existence is remembering to be in it. When we remember to feel our breath, taste our food, slake our thirst, feed our minds, mind our souls, love our families, see the beauty in the colors of the world, its cycles and seasons - that is when we are most alive.

And that is the best of all reasons to resist being enslaved by ambition. Earlier peoples, and most modern faiths remind us of the necessity of taking time to live as though the paradise we seek is already here.

Because, once we have a moment to take it in, the knowing pours from our hearts as part of the never ending flow of life’s river.

It is already here. Life is a dance we create together

Building Community one Person at a Time

By the time I was in fourth grade I was literally fighting my way through school. This was not surprising, given that I started out treating others the way I was being treated. I was cruel and sarcastic, humiliating the kids who mocked me. When other kids jumped me, I screamed and scratched and bit like a wild primate - which I was.

But I was not a stupid primate. It didn’t take me forever to realize that I was the common denominator in this bullying and that it might have had something to do with how I treated others.

There are two places you cannot bar a child from in the Midwest without drawing unwanted attention: school and church.

When I was five, I found myself attending a Catholic school that my grandmother paid for, and Hebrew school because my mother wanted me to be exposed to more than one way of thinking. Needless to say this was confusing. In Judaism, if one makes a point of faith, one is expected to defend your point of view. Priests, on the other hand, expect absolute obedience. As it happens I did not pass my first communion interview because I argued points of theology with the priest. As I would for the rest of my life, I asked impertinent questions.

I didn’t attend school in 3rd grade, and as I said, by 4th grade I was aggressively anti-social.

So I started going from church to church seeking truth. I went to conservative and liberal churches, I went to synagogues. When I did not find the information I sought, I started looking for common denominators of functional families and communities.

I studied Aquinas. I studied Spinooza. Both found God in all things. I studied Saint Francis who found God in Kindness. I studied the laws of the Torah, the Bible, the Tao, and every other major religion and I found two common denominators.

Be grateful for your existence and be kind enough to care for others.

I studied Frankl, who wrote “Man’s Search For Meaning” after his experiences in the Nazi camps. I studied people who kept their humanity in the face of suffering: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, but I also studied systemic evil. I started with M. Scott Peck who wrote “People of the Lie”. This confirmed what I was learning at home. I also read “The Road Less Traveled” and “A World Waiting to Be Born”. From Peck I learned that individuals mature through stages of faith and development and that while, in America, we believe individual independence to be the height of maturity, Peck presents the idea that this is only a phase of adolescence. To become a truly mature adult, who contributes to one’s community, the next level of maturity is sustainable interdependence.

Not long after my crash course in civility, I made two promises to myself. The first was to return insults with kindness, and the second was to offer help wherever I could.

It took time. Children who have been publicly humiliated have long memories. But over time, one by one, I gathered a collection of “secret friends” who, over the years, became not so secret. How that happened is a story for another day.

But I helped others with homework, I also became one of those folks that people trust with their secrets. Probably because I was kind, I could see pain in others, and I listened without judgement.

The tales I heard were horrifying. Coincidentally, the boy scouts that I knew had been raped, one gang raped on camping trips. I knew two girls who were ashamed of being raped and were forced to carry unwanted children to term. Young women who presumed I was a virgin came to me for birth control advice. I met girls in foster care who got pregnant either from their father or brother, they had no way of knowing.

The state returned this child to her rapists.

I knew children whose parents stole their college funds to start businesses. My own captors, by the way, stole my college fund for their criminal defense lawyer. Since children were legally property at that time, I had no rights of ownership. I knew people who were terrified to tell their parents they were gay, during the AIDs crisis, because their father believed gay people should be driven out of town at the point of a gun.

There is a movie called “Hard Core” where George C. Scott plays a conservative father, from my home town, searching for his run away daughter. The screenplay was written by Paul Shrader, also from my home town, so he knew his subject matter pretty intimately. Scott befriends a streetwalker and finds himself pulled into a world of pimps and snuff films searching for his daughter, all the while not seeing the desperate need of the child before him.

My stepmother had six siblings with daughters. Each girl ran away before they turned 16, but I was the only one who did so legally, so I was the only one not forced to return home. I had survival skills outside my community. They did not.

So I became a keeper of secrets, a healer of wounded hearts, and a conduit for survival knowledge. This commitment to being of service to others, over time, earned me a family of choice that I can rely on completely, if needed, to help me survive.

Most of these loved ones have known me for at least 25 years. They have seen me at my best, my worst, and every stage in between. They have guided me through forests of need and pain until I was finally able to walk out the other side.

It’s important to note that these are mutual, interdependent commitments. My husband and I, having this same unusual ethic, could be counted upon to show up for whatever was needed.

This could be something as simple as helping someone move, to housing a friend through long covid over the course of a year, to giving another traumatized orphan a place to catch his breath and heal enough to go back into the world again. We have sat with the dying, sometimes for months, we have cared for their children during cancer treatment. We have given counsel that preserved marriages, helped women escape from abuse, assisted with citizenship applications for ESL immigrants, resumes to help people get specific jobs, letters of recommendations to get apprentices into exclusive schools. We have taught children. We have shared stories. Hosted dinners, thrown birthday parties, celebrated orphan Thanksgivings and Christmas, reclaiming our holiday joy.

One therapist, and one well meaning friend expressed concern that I was practicing co-dependence, and not setting good boundaries. And while that was true in my early, unskilled adulthood, as I matured I was fully aware of the commitments I was making, expecting nothing in return, but building community - one relationship at a time.

In all honesty, these adopted family members have given me more than I could ever return, also without judgment or expectation.

Last week I had to admit that David and I actually needed help. Because I am pushing so hard to get stronger and healthier before we lose David’s insurance, I have been scheduling procedures back to back.

I needed to get my big toenails removed because they were ingrown. I was told it was a simple, relatively painless procedure. I bled for a week and had to have the wounds cauterized three times. For two months I couldn’t walk, couldn’t clean the house, and could not prepare food. David was working too much overtime and spending too much time shuttling me from doctor to doctor to help. Because I have been taking Mounjaro, I can eat very little each day and maintain dense nutrition with fresh vegetable juice and homemade dried fish. The house was so dusty that I itched constantly, and the floor was so dirty it was unsanitary. I was getting weaker and weaker and beginning to starve.

Under duress, I finally called my loved ones and told them I needed help. Every response was simply “What do you need and when do you need it?”

No judgement, no limits, no justifications required. For the next two weeks friends came to clean my floors, empty boxes of dishes and books, make dried fish, make soup, shop, called me, cleaned and bandaged my toes, and made sure I got out of the house enough to walk a little and get some fresh air. Susan, my dear vegetarian friend, had never caught a fish, let alone filetted one for drying. But she showed up, brave and willing, with a filet knife in hand that she left behind.

Some came by bus rides that took them a couple of hours, some came from across town in cars from homes that were still an hour away. The landlord brought more produce. My husband shaved my dreaded hair and painted flowers on my skull.

My home is now clean enough that I can maintain the floors, and David can maintain the kitchen.

As I said, it takes time and commitment. Strangers will rarely make the first move, and bringing new people into your community should be a gradual process with enough experience to know if they are trustworthy, and how much weight each person can carry. As I as disabled, I have learned to ask many people when I need help, so the burden doesn’t land on one person.

Among these friends, I have four offers to live with other families should David get hit by a bus. By now it is pretty obvious that I can no longer care for myself and I would not fare well in a medicaid nursing home. But I will never have to find out.

That is a quality of security that money can never buy. That is what community interdependence has to offer.

And it is how human beings have thrived for hundreds of thousands of years.

Anyone who tells you that the system is rigged against you, so never bed against the house, is right. But you did not create that system. And you can walk away from it and create a new one any time.

Because, in the end, life itself is the house.

And the house always wins, in the end.

Many hands make light work.

Take care of each other

Love,

Sarah

I have researched so much about modern sustainable energy sources, sustainable agriculture, and combining incredible scientific advances with ancient proven methods, I am convinced we have all the solutions we need at our finger tips. Now we need to build the will to use those tools.

Some folks who are thinking about more sustainable ways to live:

Habitat for Humanity Was founded in 1976 by former president Jimmy Carter, easily one of the most dedicated public servant of this generation, this quiet man began a revolution in creating homes in each community through public, private, neighborhood and individual efforts. This successful program has grown worldwide.

Letting Go of the American Dream What makes for a luxurious life? There are more forms of capital than money.

Regenerative Economies Investing your time and your values.

Fighting Deserification in Africa in the Sahara.

Fighting Desertification in China. All these efforts are trial and error, but continuing to try yields results.

Fighting Rainforest Desertification in South America.

Reclaiming Rocky Mountain Ecology with wolves.

I can and will go on.

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Warning: Disturbing Material About Domestic Abuse

Hi folks, increased stress on family sometimes increases domestic violence in already dangerous homes, especially during the added stress of the holidays when people feel helpless and like their world is out of control. All that frustration has to go somewhere, and the people you live with are in arm’s reach.

In my personal experience, conservative religious communities would rather cover these things up than prosecute them. Not just for public officials, but people sitting in church pews Sunday after Sunday. But, I guess if you are busy shooting frogs with tear gas, you might not have time for real crimes in your community.

This story was commissioned as a gun control piece about domestic violence for a non-profit book that was never published. This comic is one created by myself and my husband, David Lee Ingersoll . All too often these stories actually happen. This one happens to be true right up to the very end. In real life the children and mother ended up homeless. Second warning, this is a comics story but not for children.

I hope you never have to live with anything even remotely like this, but if you are experiencing domestic violence or know someone who is, here are some places to contact:

https://www.ywca.org/what-we-do/health-safety/domestic-and-sexual-violence-services?

https://www.mnadv.org/get-help/24-hour-national-hotline/

https://www.thehotline.org/

Love safely,

Sarah

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Buying Our Village

As I mentioned in my last post, I was born into slavery from age 1-15, into a middle class, middle American, seemingly normal family.

In my first 12 months of life, my mother had post-partum depression and could not hold me. I am told that, though we lived in an Indianapolis flat next to a fire station, I was a quiet, happy baby, in fact unreasonably so.

My best friend from college said that I was born with a low hand of cards to play the game of life with, and I played hard and did the best I possibly could under the circumstances.

But I would go a little farther and suggest that I was born with 5 innate characteristics without which I would never have survived. This did not make me special, just lucky enough to survive.

I was naturally cheerful, which evolved into a lifelong commitment to optimism.

I was affectionate, which grew into a heart that - no matter how many times, and how badly it was broken, always - eventually - healed stronger and more loving than it had been

I never quit. I got knocked down, but I kept getting back up. I always get back up.

I had a quick mind. Naive, isolated from the world as I was, I eventually learned to learn and learned to navigate the world around me.

Lastly, I developed an understanding that we are all wounded, we all need healing, and we need each other to survive.

By the time I was 18 months, my father had started to groom me, and my mother left my younger brother in my care for a few hours at a time. As I grew, I was tall and very articulate, so no one spoke to me like a child. I did not speak like a child. Most people presumed I was a small adult.

From age two to five, hours became days, days became weeks when my mother would leave me in charge of feeding, sheltering, and otherwise caring for my toddler brothers. Being an undiagnosed, unmedicated manic depressive, my mother would drop us off at parks, movies, with friends for weeks at a time and simply not return. Once I found her by calling her employer’s wife. That was not a happy day for anyone involved.

But that was not a time when people took children into protective custody, and it would probably have been worse than surviving on the street had been in those days. Despite our rampant attempts to protect our children from “stranger danger” most crimes against children were committed, and continue to be committed by people they know. Often with full cultural approval.

By five I lived full time, permanently with my step mother and father in Michigan, and my brothers grew up in Oakland with our mother. I did not see her again until I turned 27.

I mention this because I was trained, at an early age, to know exactly how much it costs to raise a child and how I was to earn my keep.

Each day my labor was measured to determine how much food I would be given and how much water I would be allowed to drink. I was allowed to brush my teeth once a day. Wash at the sink twice a week. Bathing and showering were considered a waste of water. I stank, obviously, and was dressed as cheaply as possible, so ugly clothes were automatic.

I was born with extremely narrow feet. Under normal circumstances, I would have worn a specially ordered size 4A, and the shoes also needed to be very thin from top to bottom. Needless to say, those shoes were never provided.

Instead, once a year out of necessity, my stepmother would take me shopping for shoes. As each store explained that I would need expensive, special order shoes, she got more enraged.

By the end of those days, I would curl my toes in any shoe that I might be able to hold onto with that tenuous grip. Once we found something that did not immediately fall off -- because I was curling my feet into toe fists - we went home.

For the rest of the year I could barely walk, because when my shoe hit the pavement, my foot went sideways in the shoe. My ankles were constantly sprained, and could not be strengthened. A school nurse once sent a letter to my captors explaining that without play, it would be impossible for me to develop normal coordination and muscle plasticity.

I was given a ball to bounce in the driveway, alone, after dark and I was too exhausted by chores to even want anything to do with the idea of “play”. Even now, play is a challenge for me. As I became an adult, art and writing were the only “play” I allowed myself, because when I was done I had made a “product”.

Outside my own mind, I owned nothing. No books. No toys. My clothes, bed, bedding did not belong to me, as I was constantly reminded, but provided by the generosity of my captors, for which I would owe payment, now or later.

Without going into the evolution of child labor laws for a moment, I want to concentrate on the idea that “It takes a village to raise a child.”

Recently on a podcast of famous people who had immigrated from Africa to America, I listened to them commiserate about how, in America, we are forced to “buy” our village. I was unable to find that podcast a second time, but I had heard this same idea from many of my immigrant friends. I did find this article with a similar observation, without having experienced poverty and making do with the resources within arms reach. https://www.scarymommy.com/parenting/buying-village-mom-tiktok No offense intended, Scary Mommy - your solutions are great, for women with their own money. For those working for 2-3 jobs at minimum wage, not so much.

In America, our time and therefore our lives have become so commodified that we separated multiple generations into different homes, live far from our family, and then struggle to pay someone to sit with the recovering mother, and do infant and toddler development care, and sit with our babies, and care for our dying, to cook our food, and sit with our animals, to repair our homes, to clean our water, to entertain us, to give us the illusion of inclusion, all while separating us more and more by the minute.

The most revolutionary thing you can do, right now, is walk over to your neighbor’s house and invite them to coffee.

We used to do that. We called them coffee clatches. Women of all ages would sit around the dining room table, kids wreaking havoc, sharing “gossip”, or as others might call it, women’s knowledge.

To earn my food each day, I rose before the sun and worked until bedtime. I was allowed an hour for homework, which I never needed, so I was able to spend that time reading anything my father happened to bring home from the box of 25 cent paperback books he bought every week.

My captors did not have a village to raise me, paid or otherwise, so I was set about the tasks required to earn my keep. Every waking day of every hour.

I would like you to take a moment to think about that in the context of modern day employers who tell you they want you to come to work afraid. Observe those whose behavior proves that cruelty is not a by-product of their plans and actions, it is the point.

I trimmed the grass by hand until my tiny fingers were blistered. I ate rotting food because I was starving. I foraged from the woods on the way home, learning what could and could not be ingested through trial and error. I lived in daily terror for my survival.

Today, even though I am relatively well, emotionally, I am still terrorized every night in my dreams. The only change that years of mental training and therapy has brought me is that now in my nightmares, I am not running away from monsters, I am battling them as children escape.

I would like you to consider what it means to reduce a human existence down to the phrase “useless eater”, if you can. It was originally coined by our favorite Nazi fascists, but recently revived as a way to describe the problem of “undesirable” populations if there is no work for them.

Is that what we were born for? Our labor?

That’s what it is to be a slave.

To have one’s life’s blood measured by the work we were forced to give? With chains or coin? It does not much matter which one in the end. Chains are chains, whether made of iron or gold.

“But humans would not work if not forced to…”

Really? After 600,000 years of existence, of hunting, gathering, managing forests, raising our children, learning from our elders, offering gratitude for life, finding beauty in the world, making art and music and dance? Would we just lay down and die?

Somehow, were we given back the bulk of our time for family and community care I think that is exactly where we would serve those who - even now - remain unserved.

We would serve the needs of the human family, not the fortune hunters.

Consider this:

According to Dr. Lyla June Johnston in the TED talk that reflects her dissertation on Native Land management and the contradiction of what we call “civilization”. Dr.Lyla shows how human beings can not only live sustainably with nature, but are in fact necessary to prosperity and abundance. Watching this might challenge what you have been taught to believe about “savages”.

Did you know that the cultures most concerned with “civilizing” savages were intentionally securing land, labor, and natural resources of the land those people lived on?

It is little known that one of the primary conflicts between Ireland and England was that the Irish preferred living close to the land in their clan systems, when interrelated clans have proven to be the best possible way to insure the highest quality of life for the greatest number of people. Without our clans, our tribes, our extended families - we must find work to eat, and we must pay for our village - rather than finding what we need on land we never cease to care for.

How many “savage” people were destroyed for practicing ancient forest ways? According to Dr. Johnston’s lecture, “How Civilization Tricked Us” this is the difference between machinery and true civility, and what it truly means to be civil to one another.

She talks about those who lost their way, among the Dine - her own people - and how the creator forced them to return to the forest and banish slavery and the caste system among them as the sin that destroyed their environment and their society.

“Hang harpers, wherever found, and destroy their instruments,” said the first Queen Elizabeth, motivated at least in part by the fear that harpists moving among high society could be spies. As well as being the tune-bearers, harpists certainly were the poets, the bards, the custodians of Gaelic law and tradition for centuries.

The harpers carried the ethnic memory of the Irish people. Harpers were once allowed to travel wherever they wished, unmolested, to witness courts, and wars, births and weddings, tales of the ordinary and the heroic were all constrained in the music shared around the fire or in the pubs. Like their language, the Irish were even forbidden their songs.

Are we now civilized?

Any time we wish, we may abandon civilization in favor of building a worthy society that serves us all. It won’t be easy, changing hearts and minds, finding new ways to cooperate and care for each other.

But we can each take that first radical step. Bring your neighbor cupcakes, or as my landlord does, apples from his own trees.

This is how we replant our village instead of buying it.

Everyone has something to share - especially in this very, very wealthy country.

Take care of each other.

Sarah

“Behind every great fortune there is a great crime.”

―Honoré de Balzac

Trigger warning - child starvation. My uncle’s nickname was Sweet William, after the flower. Everybody shortened it to Sweet, whether he deserved it or not. Sweet was always up before dawn, to practice his guitar with his calloused fingers before they were used to pick okra for the rest of the day.

Sweet and his family lived in a sharecropper’s shack that used to be slave quarters on the okra farm. The light gray wood was a splinter trap, so Sweet was careful drinking his cup of weak chicory coffee. Sweet curled himself up a little more deeply into his worn pea coat.

The early rising became a habit to have some peace before the clamor of the day, before his siblings and cousins rushed to the table. Ma would come out quietly and start breakfast with whatever she had. Flour cut with sawdust and chalk, would make a gray slurry to pour over biscuits and field greens. Maybe there would be a wild onion or a bit of lard. Everyone got half a biscuit. Sometimes Ma and Sweet skipped theirs. Pa worked the hardest, and the younger ones were still growing. Sweet was 6’2” but he was skinny as a stick and his chest was kinda sunken from malnutrition and a bout with tuberculosis as a child.

The chicory laced coffee hit the back of his spine, waking him up a bit more. It was Christmas morning, and he felt ashamed of his growling hunger. Just one less baby and maybe he wouldn’t have to be hungry all the time. Just a little less sacrifice to the smaller ones. It was important to gobble the food up at the table like a prisoner hovering over his last meal. Anything lingering on your plate would be offered to the younger ones. Poor as those meals were, there was no savoring to be had.

Sweet looked onto the gray table and his eyes stung. His mouth was watering. Before him he smelled the irresistible bite of summer in the California navel oranges and avocados piled in a chipped blue enamel plate on the table.

They didn’t last long.

Sweet poured the fruit into a cotton flour sack and ran out the screen door that clapped behind him. It wasn’t very sleuthy, as he left his footprints in the snow into the woods, but the snow still fell and the trail might be covered before the family realized he was gone. His stomach tightened a little. Always, he was sacrificing for the little ones. They got a bicycle to share. He never had a bicycle, just work. Once in a while there was rock candy. He didn’t get rock candy. Couldn’t it be his turn, just once?

There wasn’t much cover in the naked branches of the winter forest, so Sweet went high as he could. Once safely in the crook of his hiding spot, he took a bite out of his first prize. The peel was so bitter. But after he spit that out he smashed the orange into his face, inhaling it as much as tasting it.

It was better than sex! Of course his experience at 14 was paltry at best, but this was … awakening. Who knew such pleasure existed. Without even stopping to savor, he gobbled the rest of them down before he realized what he had done.

The avocados he did savor. A flavor of butter crossed with pecans. It was not sweet, but oh it was rich. He ate the avocados too, justifying to himself that there were only 6 of them.

His stomach started to turn over. There was too much sugar at one time, Sweet began to vomit out of the tree. His stolen gains were no longer delicious. And the guilt descended. Like a mark of Cain, he had betrayed his siblings. Especially the little angel Sissy. None of them had ever tasted fruit of any kind. What had his parents sacrificed to acquire this modest treasure for Christmas morning? Now all orange puke on the ground.

He continued with dry heaves as he ran desperately all the way to Owensboro. He didn’t come home for 3 days. He was going to make it right. He was going to fix it. He broke into a pawn shop and stuffed his pockets with things that sparkled and that they might be able to sell for food. He grabbed a green necklace that would set off Sissy’s eyes.

His first official crime.

And also his first arrest.

—----

The first time I wrote this story about my uncle Bill, my dearest friend didn’t understand how anyone could do such a thing to their siblings. It was then I realised that my friend had never experienced criminal hunger that can drive someone to betray the needs of their brothers and sisters. So, in the next draft I included the visceral feelings that accompany the level of hunger that erodes judgement and tests our deepest values.

Every generation of my mother’s family since emigrating from eastern Europe, in the late 1800s, were criminals or victims of significant crime. Between suicide, addiction, alcoholism, early childhood disease, homelessness, criminal violence, and domestic abuse - I don’t know what they fled, but it cannot be much worse than what they found.

In five generations they produced no viable children with functional survival skills, including me - because by the time I was healed, I was too old to raise children of my own. That is an extinction level event. These people were not prone to criminality. They were warm, affectionate, smart, talented - but criminally poor. They toiled in coal mines and as share croppers. My mother died at 52. One of her brothers died of suicide. One served a prison sentence for trafficking underage girls, and the other channeled his talents into forging government bonds. The artist was beaten to death during the 1967 Detroit riots. The remaining uncle died young of emphysema. His daughter of 45 is now dying of lung cancer. Coal country, smokings, homelesssnes, domestic abuse. It’s what she was trained for. Her children are homeless, dealers and addicts.

My father’s family, on the other hand, was very successful on this continent. Our culture would have you believe that success was based on merit and moral superiority. Don’t buy it.

My father’s family were just as criminal, just far more ambitious and ruthless.

There is a Byam genealogy society. A member of this society tracked me down quite unexpectedly in the little town of Owensboro, Kentucky. Apparently, everyone with this rare last name is, to some slim degree, related to the others. This was a flimsy distinction at best, especially since the researcher recorded his ability to recognize “the Byam eyes” in my heart shaped face. The trouble with that deduction is that my father was adopted and it was highly unlikely that I, in fact, had “Byam” eyes.

The difference between these two families was one started out with some resources, audacity and an utter lack of moral compass.

It is actually more probable that not all the Byams are related, but must have come here in modest waves. Nonetheless, the Byams first landed in Antigua in the middle 1600s, quickly became rich and powerful through human trafficking and the labor profits from their land. As the winds of political favor changed and colonies became states and protectorates, the Byams migrated their fortunes to sugar and tobacco plantations of the newly established southern states.

By no means am I suggesting the Byams created an American dynasty, as clearly they did not. However, generational wealth, a belief in merit based hierarchy, classism and racism did aid them in sustaining pleasant lifestyles from one generation to the next. My father’s family owned land in the south, and my grandfather was considered a bit of a rebel.

At 16 he bought his first motor cycle, moved to Detroit and opened his own print shop, serving illustrious clients like the Ford motor company. And though, covered with ink, he looked like a grease mechanic in overalls before he washed for dinner, he put three children through private school and college, and at the time of his death was worth about $3 million dollars. He owned a four story home in an upscale neighborhood in Detroit, kept a live-in full time servant, a farm, six rental cabins in northern Michigan, and a seventh where the family spent their summers.

When she died, my grandmother had given most of her money to the Catholic church, her children were not speaking to her, and I was the only grandchild who visited her. All those resources bought them no love, nor community - all stolen by breaking down the communities of others.

Poverty is not a character flaw. It is evidence of a systemic crime. And for all the stolen labor my father’s family acquired, he still did not know how to function without a servant. You will find that people willing to enslave their neighbors will enslave their children without much more compunction. Typically into marriages of alliance, but if necessary to placate one’s sugar mama, clipping grass with blistered hands. In the end my mother, my father, were no less pimps than my uncle had been.

And, too, I think there is a difference between the comfort of prosperity and obscene wealth. Largely, I see that difference in relative inequality of wealth distribution.

Later, I will take the time to show historical and personal examples of the distinction between trade and greed. I am all for marketplace trade. As a community we gain not only goods and food, but mutual community prosperity from the market place. Unregulated corporate capitalism is another creature entirely. It is not only immoral, but so parasitical as to ultimately kill its host.

There is, and always has been a third way. Fortunately, it comes to us so naturally that all that is required to create that third way is a combination of withdrawing support from corporate structures, looking to wise practices of the past and investigating new ideas more suited to a better future.

After some consideration, I would like to suggest that at this moment in history blaming our “individual” failures on our lack of will and character is a luxury we don’t have. It’s time to compare notes with our neighbors and see how many of us are “winning” at this particular game.

Paraphrased, Steinbeck has been quoted as saying that America has no “poor” only “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. Other than replacing millionaires with billionaires, that is a pretty astute observation of American character. It is what we are all raised to believe. Not just that if we work hard and study and contribute to our community will we prosper, but we will become rich, because we will deserve it. This implies that if you are not rich you must be lazy and not deserve it.

So let’s be real for a moment. The chances of you becoming a billionaire in the US, the richest country in the world, is .0000000875%. In comparison, your chances of getting struck by lightning are only .0000001%. Neither you, nor your children, nor your children’s children will grow up to be billionaires unless you were already born into generational wealth and they don’t need it. The bootstrap story is a lie. It’s a lie we believe with all our hearts, but it is a lie.

When I was young, I was a confirmed “enlightened” capitalist. I was given my first copy of Atlas Shrugged at 14, which ironically helped me recognize that the only way to fight gaslighting in an abusive system was to walk away. From Rand, who divided human beings into strict “good” or “evil”, I studied her protege, Nathanial Brandon, who proposed that it was not evil, but poor mental health that led people to make choices that were not in everyone’s interest.

Since I was a still a devote compassionate capitalist and a believed in employee owned companies, I had every faith that once I had the opportunity I could prove that cooperation was not only less exhausting and more productive than competition, and it was also more profitable, I would be allowed to expand my proof of concept. I was smart enough to get a merit scholarship. I had been trained to work long hours, hard days without breaking. Statistically my chances seemed pretty good.

Yet, at 21, after calculating overtime, I realized that my wages had not actually changed since I was a waitress at 16. That seemed suspicious to me. It could have been a personal failing, but after a long, hard look in the mirror, I began looking at my peers. Of the 10 merit scholars who accompanied me to college, only 2 graduated. One dealt drugs as a side hustle, the other came from a family who financially supported him while he lied in his applications.

The rest of my peers ran out of funds and dropped out. It never even occurred to me to cheat on the paper work. After 2 years on the deans list, I left school to marry a boy who promised to help me fund the rest of that education. One sweet professor was so concerned that I was leaving college because I was pregnant that he offered to adopt my child to keep me in school. He thought my talent should be encouraged to flourish. I laughed. It never occurred to me to ask him to adopt me…

So I married the boy. He didn’t keep his promise. And at 19 I found myself unskilled and stranded in Owensboro, Kentucky, without resources, friends or family.

If you are even middle class, the difference between having resources and not can mean years, even lifetimes of recovery from a single misstep.

After a challenging climb to prove myself, I was rewarded with the opportunity to manage a high end retail audio store back in the day when people actually spent money on that sort of thing. The requirements of the job were almost impossible for the average employee and the turnover was horrible. Each staff member was expected to memorize the specifications, features, and wholesale prices of every piece of inventory on the shelves and calculate, by hand, what discount they could afford to give at that moment. Commissions were based strictly on sales, customers were greeted in rotation at random. No one was being served by this method.

Instead, I gave each employee an area of their own expertise to study. Then, when a customer came in, the next salesperson up would have a partner with expertise in that department to help answer questions and assist the client and her colleague.

After 18 months, a store that was clearing $400,000 a year was drawing clientele from a fifty mile radius and clearing $1,500,000 a year. In 1982, that was significant money, about $5,000,000 in today’s dollars which was not bad for a small retail outfit in a mall.

Volume went up, profit margin went up, salaries went up and hours went down. You’d think the owner would be thrilled. He wasn’t. The company began to deny commissions based on minor clerical errors, and cancel commissions entirely on some small ticket, repeat customer sales that were based entirely on maintaining relationships. Or starting new ones. They started to squeeze the goose who laid the golden eggs.

“See how well you are doing, Sarah,” the owner said, teaching me a lifelong lesson, “doing this the wrong way?”

It had never been about profit. It was about power. Control. It had always been especially obvious to me in the south that wealth was not about quantity, but status. Were you, or were your not in a position to force others to do your bidding?

If your workforce becomes too skilled, you might have to offer competitive wages for their labor.

I withdrew my skills from the stereo store. I submitted my letter or resignation under the door before the store opened the next morning. They called. They knocked on my door. But within a week, when then knocked, I was no longer there. I had walked away.

Are you ready to walk away? In spirit if not in fact yet? For we will have to prepare, together, to make that shift.

Do we have the extra energy to spend hating ourselves? Hating each other?

Or is it time to channel that anger into useful action?

Personally, I find the latter feels more useful, and frankly gets the bile out of my system.

What’s more, when I find others who believe in community reform, we find more strength and solutions together than we do alone.

Many hands make light work.

All of us are necessary.

None of us are dispensable.

Take care of each other,

Sarah

Some folks who are making a difference in these areas right now:

Joanna Macy heads a non-profit organization which sponsors sustainable, ecofriendly entrepreneurs, especially concerning natural sustainable food systems and moving from grief to action by integrating and honoring our healthy response to the world we have built around us.

Gary’s Economic’s from a London slum came a math genius sickened by what he learned in the halls of money and power. If you don’t believe me, check his facts, check his bona fides. Then, find your own voice to add to this message from your own experiences. And share his message with your neighbors, in person, wherever possible.

Greedy Troll This just cracked me up. We gotta keep our sense of humor to get through all this serious stuff.

It Ain’t Easy Being Green Protestors in frog balloon costumes are doing the hokey pokey in Portland, as Trump sends aircraft carriers to the west coast to put down the viral spread of insurrection, proving once again how much dictators hate to be laughed at! Keep making art!

“Writing is easy. You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

This quote is typically attributed to Hemmingway, but probably originated from sports writer Red Smith. I was raised as a slave in a modern, middle class American household for 15 years until I legally freed myself by prosecuting my captors. For me, writing about this part of my life is indeed, opening a vein and bleeding on the page, but I can no longer hold silent. It’s become obvious to me that the greedy and powerful are driving us all into slavery.

The times seem to require telling bald truth in plain language. Hence the change in the title of this post.

So let’s start by taking the bull by the horns: do I as a white person have the right to use the word “slave”.

While I cannot, and do not claim to know the hardships of systemic discrimination, or racial prejudice, I can credibly speak to the damage it does to any child raised in slavery.

I have been very cautious using this word publicly all my life. Two things changed my mind. One, every black friend I have ever had said yes, that is precisely the right word. One even told me that, if it did not cause me psychological harm, I not only had a right, but a duty to tell this story.

In 1996 a short story I wrote titled “Larry Can’t Wash It Off” was published in a Spike Lee comics collection titled “Colors in Black”. The town I grew up in was well known for its intolerance. Because my name began with a “B” and his name began with an “F” Larry “F” sat next to me in school for 6 years and we developed a quiet friendship. Larry was born black to two white parents. It happens, and people who think it doesn’t don’t understand the science of genetics. We are all the same race and we all came from Africa. Larry was a tall, muscular kid covered with horrible scars from head to toe. I could not begin to imagine what his experience as a child would have been, especially at home. It likely rivaled or exceeded my own.

But this much I could see. One day I would walk away from this horrid place, and though its scars would be on my soul, and my inability to function in the world for the rest of my life, my history was not stamped upon my forehead. Larry, however, would not. Many would assume they knew who and what Larry was about the moment they saw him. In other words, Larry would never be able to wash away the evidence of how our culture had betrayed him.

Well meaning white friends have asked me if I thought it was an appropriate term and, after I explained what happened to me. My captors called me a slave in private, so it was clearly their intent.

“What would you call it?” I asked.

“Well, nothing else. That is the right word.”

Some well meaning white person once asked me if that affected me as an adult, since no one tattooed “slave” on my forehead as the Romans’ once did.

“Only when I open my mouth,” I replied. As the narrative continues, the meaning of that will also become obvious.

I have promised not to traumatize my readers. The sheer vulnerability of these stories should attest to their veracity.

In the stories that follow I will be sharing the lessons I learned from this unique perspective on our culture, as well as the strength I gathered from the overwhelming hope I gained over the years of healing from that experience. My body is physically broken, and it has taken a lifetime to heal my soul, my heart and my mind.

I believe those lessons to be timely at the moment, and I find I can no longer withhold that knowledge from the public conversation.

The second reason is that, at 63, there is not much that can be done to me that I have not already overcome.

I will be happy to respond to all reasonable inquiries in print. I will ignore provocation from trolls and bots.

If you stick with this narrative, you will find credibility in the intimacy of the narrative. As writers we are told to write what we know, and these lessons have been branded into me.

Later, I will weave in fiction, the majority of which is heroic and triumphant. But that will take time.

For now, this is what I feel I need to contribute to the public conversation.

I don’t think it can wait.

Many have told me, privately, how much they appreciate the honesty and compassion of my approach to these stories. They are not easy to write, or I would have done it by now. But I promise, again, to share minimal trauma and concentrate mostly on the lessons required to overcome those traumas and the overwhelmingly unexpected kindness of the people throughout my life who helped me to do so. I am not interested in creating trauma porn for those entertained by the pain of others.

So if you find this narrative useful, soothing or healing, I urge you to share it with one or two people you think might glean hope from what I have to say. If there is an audience for this material, or if it needs to be improved upon, I welcome your feedback.

We are all in this together.

Every moment, every action, every person matters, every time.

None of us are dispensable.

Love,

Sarah